As employers perennially do, mine is putting itself - and us - through a period of change. Not Obama ‘08 style change. We are unlikely to be energy independent by 2015, and we have no intention of rising above petty politics. We’re talking grammatically awkward bullet points, pastel shaded timelines, clipart infested change. You know, the kind of change that isn’t just illustrated with PowerPoint, it’s based on PowerPoint, there’s nothing behind the slides, and some very big gaps in between.
This period of re-invention requires regular injections of new thinking. But we’re sometimes short, so we make do with big fat saccharine spoonfuls of new language instead. This has furrowed the brows of some of my more learned colleagues. You don’t read classics at Cambridge to end up worrying about the optics and reporting on the atmospherics. “But it’s a living language,” others cry, before rhapsodizing about Shakespeare and Carroll and Snoop Dog. Izzle. Of course, old words can be just as unilluminating. You can’t talk a document into being strategic and visionary no matter how many times you refer to strategic visions and visionary strategies.
We also coin acronyms faster than the NASDAQ. We need an NFUF before we can start FFN, preferably before COP. I never have any idea whose COP. Mine or London or Moscow? Acronyms should at least save time. Think of the hours wasted saying double-u double-u double-u and not world wide web.
And the phonetics. Is it a soft ‘G’ or a hard ‘G’? Makes all the difference when you are going to the GAERC, or jerk, as half my colleagues would have it. We have at least resisted decapitalising Nato, Asean, and Opec. Not sure what is driving the FT’s campaign of decapitalising our international institutions. An uncharacteristic dig at globalisation perhaps.
Anthropomorphization is less popular. My campaign to phoneticse my group, FSPG, into fizzy pig is meeting resistance. I suspect they fear the next step will be a carbonated porcine mascot.
The only thing on which most of us still agree is that impact is not - yet - a verb.
This period of re-invention requires regular injections of new thinking. But we’re sometimes short, so we make do with big fat saccharine spoonfuls of new language instead. This has furrowed the brows of some of my more learned colleagues. You don’t read classics at Cambridge to end up worrying about the optics and reporting on the atmospherics. “But it’s a living language,” others cry, before rhapsodizing about Shakespeare and Carroll and Snoop Dog. Izzle. Of course, old words can be just as unilluminating. You can’t talk a document into being strategic and visionary no matter how many times you refer to strategic visions and visionary strategies.
We also coin acronyms faster than the NASDAQ. We need an NFUF before we can start FFN, preferably before COP. I never have any idea whose COP. Mine or London or Moscow? Acronyms should at least save time. Think of the hours wasted saying double-u double-u double-u and not world wide web.
And the phonetics. Is it a soft ‘G’ or a hard ‘G’? Makes all the difference when you are going to the GAERC, or jerk, as half my colleagues would have it. We have at least resisted decapitalising Nato, Asean, and Opec. Not sure what is driving the FT’s campaign of decapitalising our international institutions. An uncharacteristic dig at globalisation perhaps.
Anthropomorphization is less popular. My campaign to phoneticse my group, FSPG, into fizzy pig is meeting resistance. I suspect they fear the next step will be a carbonated porcine mascot.
The only thing on which most of us still agree is that impact is not - yet - a verb.
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