Tuesday, July 05, 2016

The not-so-sweet smell of bullshit

Every now and then I contemplate returning to the real world and getting a proper job (maybe even the sort that Nigel Farage would approve of), and then something happens to convince me otherwise. Most recently it's been the testimony of a friend who, over the course of just two days of a "corporate retreat", had the pleasure of hearing his snake-oil salesman of a manager say the following, without even the merest shred of irony or self-awareness:

"What drivers will move the needle?"

"We need to raise the altitude of our thinking."

"I enjoy gaining insights from data-driven decisions."

"We need to move from activation to mobilisation to the delivery of enablement."

"We need to commit and align towards a reality."

"Change has changed a great deal."

"Communication is a conscious commitment."

"Customer success is a wholesome commitment."

"We need to move from entrapment to engagement."

"I want to float some of these stories."

"Do we understand what customer empathy looks like?"

"Invent the future through the customer lens."

"We need to enable change through a platform mentality."

"Customer experience is the foundation of the transformation."

"We don't want to ignore inventing the new."

"Don't challenge to raise the bar low."

"Don't leave the takeaways here - take them with you."

And best of all:

"If there is a big white elephant in the room, you need to put it on the table."

Complete and utter bullshit, the lot of it. Language is supposed to be a tool for communication - but in the hands of fuckwits like this, it's instead deliberately used to obfuscate and confuse, to conceal a dearth of ideas, and devalued to the point of sterile meaninglessness.

So, yes I don't have a pension or holiday/sick  pay - I'm just relieved I don't have to be subjected to this nonsense on a daily basis.

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