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@LongAndWinding
From - http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/life/article3480074.ece
[INDENT]*... I saw Nick Buckles give evidence before the Home Affairs Committee and it was like watching a man who’d eaten a book on management-speak defaecate the contents on to the parliamentary carpet.
What is a “reporting template”, a “cascade”; what are “filters in place”, “massive pipelines” and “backended processes”? Apart from business-speak porn? As I expected, the G4S website, too, is an orgy of jargon where we learn that the company’s “vision is to be recognised as the global leader in providing secure outsourcing solutions, to help customers to achieve their own strategic goals”. That it has an “unrivalled geographic footprint” and works “to build solutions that combine our knowledge of in-store security processes” ... oh, someone make it stop.
How I despise that word “solutions”. It has soiled the language to the point where food companies now offer “breakfast solutions”. Or in the non-tossers’ universe, “toast”. A colleague once saw a sign offering “contemporary solutions to light control”. They were selling blinds. Why are so many people afraid of plain English? Is it because behind their windy verbiage there is often a steaming pile of mediocrity?
I will say that G4S (which Twitter notes is text-speak for “guffaws”) deserves respect for being the world’s second largest private employer; it must be vaguely competent some of the time to have grown that big. But, like other companies, it should know that pompous circumlocution merely gives the impression that there’s something to hide. If your product is good, let it speak for itself.
Recently the journalist John Simpson wrote an open letter to the new Director-General of the BBC urging him to hunt down and destroy any Birtian management jargon “that sounds as if it could have come from Kim Jong Un”. He’s right. The savage round of BBC cuts, he said wryly, has been given the revoltingly euphemistic title “Delivering Quality First”. What cant.
No wonder Mr Buckles didn’t know until July 3 that there wouldn’t be enough staff for the Olympics. He probably couldn’t fathom what anyone in his company was talking about. Perhaps someone said something such as “there has been a core competencies and synergies fail and we may fall outside the solutions delivery window”, and he nodded, none the wiser.
Constipated management-speak is the enemy of transparency. But after everything we’ve been through lately, transparency is what the world wants. Some experts believe that people often resort to business jargon out of laziness and because they don’t believe in what they are offering.
I don’t know if either of these applies to G4S but if I were Mr Buckles or, indeed, any company manager, I would now be thinking outside the box, picking the low-hanging fruit, opening the kimono — and ditching the bulls**. Action that ... today.[/INDENT]