“Let’s run it up the flagpole and see who salutes and then we’ll have a meeting before the announcement to make sure everyone is singing from the same hymn sheet.”
I’m old enough to remember the good old days of corporate bullcrap when the language actually had some humour to it, intentionally or unintentionally. My all-time favourite, however, still has to be the line from a documentary about UK distributor Northamber a number of years ago where one of the managers, commenting on the future prospects of one of his charges, remarked with some disappointment: “You can’t take a duck to eagle school”.
As I have mentioned before, having spent many years reading and listening to corporate jargon, much of it seeming to have originated from the technology world, I am not surprised to see that so much corporate writing has been taken over by AI. Something that perpetrates so many crimes against language so frequently, is clearly entirely suited to be produced by artificial intelligence. There’s nothing super about the intelligence required to create corporatese. Yes, it does call for translation skills but they’re ones where the job is to take the clarity of simple words in the English language and render them as close to unintelligible as possible. It’s actually a kind of super unintelligence.
It’s only right, therefore, that we should take this moment to salute the heroic endeavours of Dave Doty, a veteran of more than 10,000 corporate meetings who claims to have spent 35 years collecting, as The Register puts it, “buzzwords, clichés and other verbal atrocities inflicted on office workers”. By my calculations, assuming four weeks holiday a year, Doty averaged around six meetings a week. That’s a reasonable number but it’s nothing outrageous.
Doty told The Register: “I am an executive who has suffered through over 10,000 meetings during the course of my 30-year career. To keep my sanity, in each of them, I wrote down all of the buzzwords and business clichés and have built an enormous database of them.”
The good news is that Doty has turned that database to effective use with the creation of an app for the iPhone and Android called Executive Eight Ball. The app takes the corporate mumbo-jumbo and mashes it together into phrases that are only slightly less mindnumbing and unintelligible than the real outpourings of executives or their corporate quotes in press releases.
Take this one, for example: “As per my memo, push beyond limited growth while we concurrently build a decision framework along with an effort to track the deliverable timing.”
‘Achievements’ unlocked
I can see people nodding along as the CEO solemnly declaims this gooblededook at a user conference or product launch. No one knows exactly what he means but everyone pretends that they do.
Or how about: “Initially, unlock synergies which is foundational to our ability to ensure continuous improvement.”
Makes perfect sense, doesn’t it?
As does: “In the interim, sustain the project cadence as a forcing function to build-out the stakeholder management plan.”
While this is supposed to be a fun app designed to make people laugh at the sheer inanity and incoherence of corporate speak, it’s not beyond the bounds of possibility that it could also serve as a source for management types seeking inspiration for their next email or LinkedIn post. After all, just because we don’t understand it, doesn’t mean the person saying it or writing it does understand it.
But it also highlights something else: when words lose their meaning, they become insignificant, they have no connection with reality. We nod along without listening, we read them but our eyes glaze over. By placing certain words next to each other or in the same sentence, it is possible to remove all their individual value while creating an appearance of meaning or profundity that would fail to survive even the most cursory examination.
The statements emanating from the app illustrate that we no longer have an agreed value and meaning for words. There is no common currency for words anymore. The only thing that remains is the simulation of knowledge designed to disguise the illiteracy and incoherence of the thought behind it. And you don’t need intelligence, artificial, super or otherwise, to tell you that if words mean nothing, they can mean anything.
Ltd
