Blowing up the police ?

I fought the law and the law didn't win?

As an aside I see a lot of articles talking about Gen Z this and Gen Z that but the things attributed to Gen Z don't ring true with my Gen Z kids or their group of friends... or any one they know. I seem to remember the same problem when the media were talking about my generation when we were late teens/young adults... sigh! Besides which, a lot of what we thought then changed as we grew up and experienced the world.... our dreams were cruelly crushed and cast aside leaving us hollow husks of what could have been..... I must stop drinking beer at lunch time :-)

“The mass of men live lives of quiet desperation.”

Thanks Thoreau.

I've got a migraine after trying to grok that first paragraph.

Me to. And I am apparently (from the definition of the age groups) old.

I would not call that "jargon" - for me "jargon" is the technical lingo or even the stupid roles / names / abbreviations that bigger projects tend to create around / inside them. It is not the use of weasel words à la Moist von Lipwig.

Then again, all that corporate-bullspeak is just the shiny new "leadership product" sold by marketing scammers to incompetent idiots at the top of companies. Zoomers will eventually fall for the same sales pitch under a different name in 20-30 years. Get your certification today! Oh, and sign up for the level 2 certification next year for a big discount!

The fact that, despite everyone and their dog spotting corporate bullshit from a mile away and despising it, is not enough for corps/"decision makers" to stop using it, is what should be studied.

The phrases they list above fall into the "management bollocks" category, and in my experience people of all ages tend to despise them unless they are (or aspire to be) in the maglement ranks - specifically those roles who 'manage' but aren't directly responsible for doing any of the actual work themselves...

"The survey quizzed 1,016 employees in the UK aged 18 to 76"

Blimey, still working in the corporate world aged 76? Even with the current economic disaster we're seeing this is still very uncommon.

Probably the shelf-stackers at my local Asda

Do you mean replenishment operatives?

.. Just pushing the Tea trolley; through the aisles of reality wishing for the end.. That's me ..

And then, finally, you lose your temper and lash out.

One lump and then two more.

Blimey, still working in the corporate world aged 76?

At a guess, pension slaughtered by the financial shenanigans in the 80's/90's. I know of more than a few in that situation over here too.

""The survey quizzed 1,016 employees in the UK aged 18 to 76""

It gets worse: "defining the younger generation as those born between 1981 and 2012". These born in 2012 aren't even teenagers, let alone 18. Child labour?

> Even more shamefully, 83 percent used a word they didn't know the meaning of in a professional situation.

Does it count if I'm using a word that I fully know has no meaning in said situation?

The challenge is to make up a word or use one to mean something which it doesn't mean, and see how many people you can get to start doing the same!

"OEM" :-)

Gentlemen*, I give you layer caking .

As in: "I think the consultant is layer-caking the meeting. Shall we dip out for a pint?" No, don't ask me what it means - but it sounds excellent!

*By convention. Of course, I mean 'anyone wot is reading this' - but I'm an oldie and we're stuck in our ways.

Language and linguistic nuances might differ from region to region or generation to generation, but bullshit knows no bounds.

That type of dialogue is a great indicator of a company about to go belly up (or become a government contractor, politicians are always keen to welcome fellow bullshitters into their steads).

Perfect example of an article that should have been taken offline, way offline and never been circled back.

Communication is all about getting information across. If jargon helps with that then it is useful, but if it is being used for obfuscation then it hinders communication. The problem with a great many in business is that they hear the jargon, mis-understand it and then later mis-use it leading to confusion and bafflement. Worse still are those self-aggrandising "trend-setters" who think that their every pronouncement is pure gold so then invent the most dire bullshit jargon and try to pass it off as "something they heard". Languages need to evolve to fit the needs of their users and natural evolution is best (ask the French about the Académie Française), but when jargon just leads to more confusion then communication fails. Every field has it's jargon including management, but very few use their jargon when talking to those who don't know it,... except for management. Please,... when you are talking to non-managers, leave the jargon out and use plain language. As an example you could say "in the future" instead of "going forward".

I got sick of management jargon many years ago, so when it came up in smaller meetings I started discussing things in terms of IT/Electronics/Physics jargon and thoroughly enjoyed seeing the confusion on their faces, and of course at later meetings thoroughly enjoyed hearing the jargon I had used completely mis-used by them.

As for the communication difficulties between generations, nothing new there, and often more difficult to decipher than foreign languages like American and Australian. ;-)

It is meeting and memo (remember those?) language used by manglement and marketing to make themselves sound like they are doing something useful and productive. I'm in the older set and like you have occasionally thrown in my own terms just to confuse them. I think the percentages are just that way because we have been exposed for longer learnt to deal with it, not because we like it.

"Kadir beneath Mo Moteh"

"Unzak and Vhila as children?"

"Communication is all about getting information across. If jargon helps with that then it is useful, but if it is being used for obfuscation then it hinders communication. The problem with a great many in business is that they hear the jargon, mis-understand it and then later mis-use it leading to confusion and bafflement."

I've always assumed it comes from the fact that many technical and manufacturing industries and specialisms have a lot of specific jargon and terminology which is genuinely required and relevant in that area, referring to items, technical processes etc. When 'management' invented itself as a supposed specialism in its own right, it had to invent its own argot to try to prove that it was a real specialism (and bamboozle those who didn't understant it). The fact that actually there are no specialist terms required here led to the sort of bollocks we see quoted above. Used 'correctly' or not, who really cares? It remains unnecessary and ridiculous bollocks either way!

Shock horror. There are intergenerational language differences. Twas ever thus, daddio.

It's not intergenerational, it's management/marketing/sales vs everyone else (for a change).

Were they ever not against everyone else?

So not only are more senior staff running rings around young employees with their hollow lexicon, but they aren't helping them understand either – 69 percent of younger workers say they had to figure this stuff out on their own.

The only thing anyone need understand is that it's a load of middle and upper management bollocks designed to camouflage their essential pointlessness. And most of the older, productive people got there on their own and probably figure the younger ones will also figure it out for themselves before too long.

That's a polite way of saying business bullshit is business bullshit.

Maybe our age means we're less amenable to this nonsense, having heard it far far too often. It's just a way of having some mostly pointless management suck-up speak without actually saying anything... only later to claim that his underlings were indeed informed about "x" or "y" because, well, like Humpty Dumpty, those words mean exactly what he wants them to mean and nothing more.

If the underlings have any experience and wit they'll have asked for "x" and "y" to be explained in plain words. I think in my day I was regarded as a bit of a trouble-maker.

"Surprisingly, 69 percent of younglings say their colleagues speak in too much jargon at work, while only 38 percent of graybeards have the same misgivings."

Not too surprising. It just means that some of us have heard it all before, several times around, learned to separate the wheat from the chaff and decode the former. The young are fortunate not to have endured that. Yet.

At its best a jargon is a specialised vocabulary which enables one to say in a few words what would require many less specialised words to explain fully. It depends on the listener or reader sharing that vocabulary.

At its worst jargon is a specialised vocabulary taking many words to say that which needs no explanation and could be said in fewer, less specialised words.

Then there are those who have heard the words of the first, have no understanding of their meaning but trot them out any way, hoping to sound as if they're in the set that does understand them* and mixing them with words of the second.

* E.g. Amber Rudd with "hashtags".

"Google a word during a meeting in an attempt to understand what on earth manglement is talking about"

If it's manglement talking a good approximation would be to start by assuming it has no meaning until you can work it out in context but don't be suspired if you end the meeting without working it out. Retaliate by coining your own term, using it and seeing how the others pick it up and reuse it.

"suspired"

Damned autocorrect! surprised

" OK, people, let's engage in some proactive ideation and synergize cross-functionally to leverage our core competencies and maximize deliverables. Let's think outside the box and optimize our bandwidth while aligning our key performance indicators. Remember to touch base and provide visibility on the low-hanging fruit, ensuring we stay on track with our strategic objectives. It's essential to leverage our scalable solutions and adopt a data-driven approach to drive paradigm shifts and achieve our stretch goals. Let's dive deep, drill down into the granular details, and pivot if necessary, all while fostering a culture of continuous improvement."

That's our company Mission Statement .. !!

.. I'm going to need a minute, here .. sorry ..

still had some self-worth left and were trying to fight the management Bullshit speak.

The other 62% *were* The Management and are the ones spouting this bollocks (to be gleefully taken up by the 41% of youngsters in sales and "creative" positions who just follow whatever is trending within a 10 metre radius.

No, they were the ones who still hadn't worked out it was a load of bollocks to be ignored.

Ah, that paragraph reads like something cooked up by the vultures at the Strategy Boutique.

Innovative e-solutions to the sound of whalesong. (I miss my old Strategy Boutique shirt).

Mine is the one moving forward in pushing back the envelop of corporate paradigm

Putting this story next to the sponsored one below was a little on the nose.

"Squaring the circle of sustainable transformation

The right partner can help CIOs maintain the delicate balance of innovation and sustainability"

This article written by George Orwell is essential reading:-

https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwell/essays-and-other-works/politics-and-the-english-language/

I find this particular paragraph quite timeless, given how long ago it would have been written:-

The writer either has a meaning and cannot express it, or he inadvertently says something else, or he is almost indifferent as to whether his words mean anything or not. This mixture of vagueness and sheer incompetence is the most marked characteristic of modern English prose, and especially of any kind of political writing. As soon as certain topics are raised, the concrete melts into the abstract and no one seems able to think of turns of speech that are not hackneyed: prose consists less and less of words chosen for the sake of their meaning, and more and more of phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated hen-house.

The reality is that certain people who are utterly ignorant use a stream of meaningless drivel to try and sound like they are actually some kind of high level specialist that actually has some idea of what they are doing. They rely entirely upon other people not challenging them on this and their personal nightmare would be somebody who simply says "are you trying to say A?" and forces them to pin themselves down to a meaning in English; their preference is to essentially gaslight people by forcing them to redefine the meaningless drivel that they spew to actually have some form of worthwhile meaning which they can change at will by saying "no, that's not what I meant".

Discussion among professionals in a particular field, e.g. economists, analytic philosophers, theatre 'luvvies', and footballers, may be impenetrable to the casual eavesdropper. That is usually forgivable, sometimes an essential, when 'expert' speaketh unto 'expert'.

When 'experts' utter unto laymen using an arcane lingo, said experts may be condemned as thoughtless, seeking to impress, arrogant, or simply stupid. A prime example is when Personnel (aka Human Resource) departments issue job advertisements. There appears to have been convergence in opacity and prolixity of language expressing characteristics of desired candidates and outlining the tasks expected of them. Two words are better when one would do, long words impress more than short, and jargon drawn from psychology and social science ices the rotten cake.

As discussed in the article, nowadays (synonym to 'in this day and age') 'professionals' engaged in management excel at 'management-speak'. Given that 'management' is not strictly a 'profession' in the latter word's original meaning, and that 'management' is lacking a solid base of learning (quality rather than sheer quantity), it is unsurprising that its practitioners seek to impress each other and lay folk too with their ersatz erudition.

One finds in life that the clearest of thinkers express themselves in the simplest form consistent with getting their messages across to their audiences. Wandering into the discourse of management, social sciences, and practical politics, is an eye opener for people used to language as means of concise, and unambiguous, communication, and in possession of a sensibility recognising that clarity and elegance coexist.

"Take a Break, Original Poster."

...the worldwide acceptance of MBAs.

Icon because——->

tl;dr

In my view, the only people allowed to use the phrase "reach out" are the Four Tops.

... but I now have a craving for ducks baked in a row with low-hanging fruit. I'm sure they serve it in my local gastropod.

Dear All,

I think we need to hit the ground running, keep our eye on the ball, and make sure that we are singing off the same song sheet. At the end of the day it is not a level playing field and the goal posts may move; if they do, someone else may have to pick it up and run with it. We therefore must have a golf bag of options hot-to-trot from the word 'go'. It is your train set but we cannot afford to leave it on the back burner; we've got a lot of irons in the fire, right now.

We will need to un-stick a few potential poo traps but it all depends on the flash-to-bang time and fudge factor allowed. Things may end up slipping to the left and, if they do, we will need to run a tight ship. I don't want to re-invent the wheel but we must get right into the weeds on this one. If push comes to shove, we may have to up stumps and then we'll be in a whole new ball game.

I suggest we test the water with a few warmers in the bank. If we can produce the goods then we are cooking with gas. If not, then we are in a world of hurt. I don't want to die in a ditch over it but we could easily end up in a flat spin if people start getting twitchy. To that end, I want to get round the bazaars and make sure the movers and the shakers are on-side from day one. If you can hit me with your shopping list I can take it to the head honchos and start the ball rolling.

There is light at the end of the tunnel and I think we have backed a winner here. If it gets blown out the water, however, I will be throwing a track. So get your feet into my in-tray and give me chapter and verse as to how you see things panning out. As long as our ducks are in a row I think the ball will stay in play and we can come up smelling of roses.

Before you bomb burst and throw smoke, it is imperative we nail our colours very firmly on the mast and look at the big picture. We've got to march to the beat of the drum. We are on a sticky wicket. we'll need to play with a straight bat and watch out for fast balls.

I've been on permanent send for long enough and I've had my ten pence worth. I don't want to rock the boat or teach anyone to suck eggs. We must keep this firmly in our sight picture or it will fall between the cracks. If the cap fits, wear it, but it may seem like pushing fog up a hill with a sharp stick.