Friday, January 18, 2013

BUREAUCRAT SPEAK


24/7; Sweatshop approach to labour.
Benchmark; A standard either impossible to attain or easily attained depending on whether you get to set the benchmark.
Best practice; The CEO/Minister’s way of doing things
Big picture; A way of defending the indefensible by implying there is a strategy involved and it is not simply a stuff up.
Blue Sky; An overly optimistic view, usually accompanied by the phrase Green Fields, denoting little or no chance of a screw up but inevitably ending in a dark day.
Bottom line; The amount of profit that determines your bonus. Every piece of policy and planning is therefore focussed on achieving bottom line and therefore bonus – even at the longer-term risk of destroying the company/SOE. Example: Kordia
Brainstorm; Picking someone else’s brain, stealing the idea and representing it as your own because you have no real idea what to do otherwise.
Business model; How the company/SOE should be run but never is.
Churn; You get this if you run 24/7, it usually denotes the number of people fired, quit, made redundant, died or disappeared from your labour force which also, inevitably, leads to churn in your audience.
Client focus: Sucking up, see Do Lunch.
Core business; The difficult and boring bit otherwise known as broadcasting which is nowhere near as good as some harebrained blue skies green fields opportunity which means you cannot be judged by measurable results.
Cross functional; Making your problem everyone else’s problem.
Customer focussed/ client focussed; Sucking up for business.
Do lunch; A good way of remaining client focussed (and then unfocussed).
Excom; A senior management committee comprised mainly of people who have never worked in the productive side of the business.
Empower; You empower someone by dumping your crap on them to sort out.
Fast track; Ram it through before anyone can object.
Feedback; Criticism disguised as constructive advice.
Future proof; Cover your arse.
Game plan; Hopefully a way of achieving the Big Picture or, at the very least, the pretence of a strategy.
Green Fields; No-one’s tried it before so we can make a killing and, even if we don’t, because no-one’s tried it before success cannot be truly measured and we can’t be criticised for failing.
Heads Up; Really means “heads down, duck, there’s a pile of crap coming our way”.
Incentivise; Bribe (see bonus).
Interface; The bit of he business you have grease up to make sure you get what you want.
It’s a journey; We’ve stuffed up, failed to achieve a target and have no idea where we’re headed, therefore we’ll never set a deadline for completion or someone will find out we’re screwed.
Key Messages; A PR term denoting the nature and the order of lies to be told to the gutter press so as to put the best possible spin on yet another screw up.
Knowledge Base; Brains that can be picked so as to later present the ideas as your own.
Let’s take a moment; Take a big cup of ‘Shut the Fuck Up!’
Leverage; A gun to the head or a way of extracting unforeseen cash/policy from some improbable plan.
Low hanging fruit; Easily achieved financial savings, e.g. stopping cab chits, removing he building’s pot plants and making the staff drink instant coffee.
Matrix; A meaningless word used to complicate a simple set of relationships affecting your business.
Mindset; Dangerous independent thought, therefore used most in the context of “changing mindset”.
Monetise; A way of screwing a buck out of something that is usually not inclined to surrender a dollar.
Moving forward; Putting past stuff ups behind you and concentrating on a mysterious future point at which everything miraculously comes right. Also known as The Clark School of Problem Management.
No-brainer; Don’t think about it, just do it, you’ll never spot the inevitable downside anyway.
No Surprises; A policy that means you tell the CEO of anything that could cause effluent and a fan to connect, the CEO tells the chairman and the chairman tells the minister so that the government can take cover.
Optimise; Milk it.
Organisational Review; Redundancies and budget cuts.
Out of the loop; Worst place to be, no-one telling you anything. The only benefit is you can’t be blamed if anything goes wrong.
Paradigm; A word used to explain a complex business/political situation no-one anticipated and everyone is now groping to understand.
Pro-active; Dumping your crap on someone before they dump their crap on you.
Relationship/ Partnership; A cunning combination of behaviour involving sucking up to coalition partners and ensuring they carry some of the cost.
Result driven; You’re fired if the poll ratings don’t go up.
Re-visit; We got it wrong again and now have to go back and fix it.
Refer Up; A policy whereby underlings attempt to escape responsibility for their actions by passing decisions up the corporate food chain. Eventually the policy of  No Surprises takes over and the government is warned to take cover.
Robust; Something so tough no-one can see the flaws in it until too late.
Run it up the flagpole; Seriously suggesting something you want but implying you don’t really care just in case everyone thinks it’s a dumb idea.
Solution; A word seldom used in management as it is too categorical. Usually found only in the phrase “there is no quick solution”, meaning there is no such thing as a solution.
Speed to market; A panicked rush to get something on air or on sale because we have nothing else.
Stakeholder; Interfering busybodies who foolishly believe they have an interest in your business and could stuff you up.
Step Change; What we’re doing is not working and we need to think up another dumb idea.
Strategic fit; What I want.
Synergy; I’ll scratch your back, you scratch mine.
Take that off line; As in “let’s take that off-line”, which really means “shut the fuck up, I’ll sort you out later”. See ‘Let’s take a moment.’
Take that on board; Accepting someone else’s idea but hoping they’ll forget about it and then you can do nothing.
Thinking outside the box/outside the square; Having an original idea that the CEO/Minister later can claim as his own.
Ticks in boxes; The annoying details that have to be done to slip it past the board.
Touch base; I’ll call you when I think the time is right.
Turnaround; Hauling arse out of the crap.
User friendly; Something so simple even a board member could know how to do it.
Win-Win; A mythical situation where your partners are supposed to do as well as you do.
Value proposition; Where’s the buck in this?

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