A (Very Qualified) Defense of Some Corporate Jargon
There is a cottage industry of writers moaning about the stupidity of corporate jargon, and there certainly are some egregious examples of it to be found. But most paint with far too broad a brush (to use some jargon).
Andrew Sullivan excerpts a New Yorker article about a “Corporate-Jargon-to-English Dictionary”:
You type in a particularly odious word or phrase—“incentivize,” say—and “Unsuck It” spits out the plain-English equivalent, along with a sentence for context. (“Incentivize” means “encourage” or “persuade,” as in “In order to meet our phase 1 deliverable, we must incentivize the workforce with monetary rewards.”) One feels a certain cathartic glee as well-worn meeting-room clichés are dismantled one by one: an “action item” is a “goal”; “on the same page” means “in agreement”; to “circle the wagons” is to “defend an idea or decision as a group”.
At least two of these three examples are misleading translations.
“Action item” is much more specific than ”goal.” It is much closer to “a specific task that will be assigned to one person or one identified organizational unit before the conclusion of the meeting”. “Incentivize” also has a much more specific meaning than “encourage” or “persuade”. As per the contextual sentence, it normally refers to setting up comp schedules, feedback forms, promotion guidelines and the other economically-linked HR details that are required to, well, incentivize people. If you substitute “persuade” for “incentivize” in a meeting, you will lose this meaning.Plain speaking is in short supply everywhere, but too often, people who don’t seem to have ever had the experience of trying to accomplish a series of tasks at scale in a large for-profit corporation expose their inexperience in making these kinds of criticisms. Jargon develops inside organizations, in part, to help coordinate activities efficiently. It should lead the author of the criticisms to question her premises when at least some of these terms are widely used not only in unsuccessful, but also highly successful, corporations.
(Cross-posted at The Corner)
Simply replace “action item” with “assignment,” and you haven’t really changed the meaning. An assignment is typically specific and small scale, suggesting it’s the responsibility of “one person or. . . organizational unit” to tackle it, pronto.
Of course, if pronto isn’t good enough— you need to convey ASAP!— “action item” might have its place, especially for a keyed-up entrepreneur who is way-finding means of lighting efficiency fires under the crushed butts/souls of his wage stooges.
I’ll concede, though, that while “action item” and “incentivize” may bang on the ear a little, they’re not that bad. Indeed they could be less necessary. Take for instance, possibly the worst recent habit of well-educated writers, and one Manzi indulged a few posts ago: the use of “disconnect” as a noun. Why turn a verb into a noun when there’s a perfectly good noun version at hand? When people say or write, “we’ve reached a disonnect. . .” it snags the ear, it causes an interior wince, like when you hear somebody pull up short on her sneeze. It’s pervasive, however, and never adds anything to the writer’s or speaker’s point, except to pretentiously signal insight. Of course, it’s grown pervasive enough, that I think many writers use it without any intention of artificially puffing up an otherwise bland observation. They do so, thoughtlessly. And that’s what makes “Unsuck It” useful: it incentivizes— strike that, encourages— us to revisit terms or term uses that we don’t question enough, especially those terms that are superfluous, trendy or downright disconcerting.
— Hasil · Apr 25, 05:26 PM · #
Hasil,
There is a lot of poor speaking and writing in the world(and I’m as guilty of it as the next guy). I also agree that “assignment” is far better replacement for “action item”. My point was that the “de-jargonization engine” (ha ha) demonstrated very poor understanding of the terms they meant to criticize. Much worse than yours, for example.
— Jim Manzi · Apr 25, 05:57 PM · #
It’s interesting. We just interviewed some candidates for a senior position here, and one struck many people as being too “slick.” I think it was because he used a lot of jargon and little catch-phrases like the ones illustrated here. So maybe there’s hope.
— Chris · Apr 25, 06:29 PM · #
The problem with “assignment” rather than “action item” is that “assignment” implies that there is somebody to whom it has been assigned. This is often not the case with action items that come out of meetings/discussions. It’s a small distinction but there’s a reason that the words used are the ones used. They are the most accurate across the board.
This is, of course, far too often not the case with other jargon. But to dismiss all of it is a definite “baby with the bathwater” situation.
— Logopolis Mike · Apr 25, 07:16 PM · #
incentivize = reward, not encourage.
Jargon, all too often, is a substitute for thinking about what we really want to say. A discussion like this helps us to pay attention to what we mean to say.
— bill_who · Apr 25, 07:28 PM · #
Jim,
My #1 action item was to irk you with a crabby, tiresome, wise-cracking reply. Clearly, I failed. But I won’t give up. It remains on my action agenda.
— Hasil · Apr 26, 01:18 AM · #
Thinking about the objections to jargon, aside from its ugliness, I can think of two objections, one minor and one less so. The minor objection: the nature of jargon limits it portability. The people in the department that you regularly meet with may understand the exact overtones of an “action item” and how it differs from a goal, task or assignment. The rest of the world, however, may not share your understanding: consider the ambiguity Logopolis Mike noted.
The less minor objection involves the tendency of jargon to include back-formed verbs. To the extent that jargon aims at developing a precise language for particular applications such as business, back-forming verbs tends to defeat that purpose, because of a particular property of nouns and verbs. A great many nouns exist for classes of objects: a machine, for example, can mean anything from a backhoe to a server blade. When we hear machine, we know that unless we want to talk about the common properties of all machines, we need a more precise definition. Verbs, on the other hand, tend to refer to more specific actions: walk, talk, drive, speed, fly, etc. Back-forming a verb, therefore, entails a serious risk of lending an air of precision to an imprecise statement. For example, a great many incentives fail because they operate at cross purposes with the needs of the task, by threatening where the task requires morale, or by fostering competition where the task requires teamwork. The jargon word incentivize obscures these problems, and obscures as well its own imprecision.
— John Spragge · Apr 27, 04:26 AM · #
Also, “on the same page” does not mean “agreement”. It means “sharing the same frame of reference”, which can be consistent with disagreement. It’s a metaphor, and a reasonably vivid one.
“Circle the wagons” is harder to defend, because it really is a dead metaphor. No one watches Westerns any more.
— Pithlord · Apr 28, 12:03 AM · #
You meant to be pithy, no doubt, but I’m all for the dead metaphor. “Circle the wagons” is terrific, and even when everyone was watching Westerns, no one had actually circled wagons for decades, if even then.
“See you on the flip side” falls in the same category. It’s a great, evocative piece of jargon. So what if the LP is a relic?
To my ear, these are different from corporate lingo, which does practically nothing but superficially gun for aggressive motivation. I mean, I get it, if advising an employee to be “proactive” creates just a sliver more urgency and the promise of greater profits, why not exploit it? But purely on a level of grammatical excitement, it’s such a fucking dud, you have to accept that to say it is mere shillery.
— Hasil · Apr 28, 04:21 AM · #
“Circle the wagons” is harder to defend, because it really is a dead metaphor. No one watches Westerns any more.
What would you offer as a substitute? What would be a better way of communicating the same meaning?
BTW, according to Wikipedia, people still DO watch westerns:
With the growth of cable television and direct broadcast satellites, reruns of Westerns have become more common. Upon its launch in 1996, TV Land carried a block of Westerns on Sundays; the network still airs Bonanza and the color episodes of Gunsmoke as of 2011. Encore Westerns, part of the Encore slate of premium channels, airs blocks of Western series in the morning and in the afternoon, while the channel airs Western films the rest of the day.
And I watch an old “Eastern” once in a while. These are the Russian version. Leonid Brezhnev liked Chuck Conners and his work, so encouraged a Russian counterpart to these movies. So there are stories about the settlement of the wild east, complete with equally impressive (and impossible) feats of gunmanship. “White Sun of the Desert” is a well-known one, and is available from Netflix.
New Statesmen article about White Sun
I’m not sure if I’ve ever seen the wagons circled, though. A pioneer family with horse and wagon, heading into country inhabited by primitive but dangerous natives, yes. A great train robbery, yes. Acrobatic feats of gunmanship, yes. But circling the wagons? Not sure.
— The Reticulator · Apr 28, 04:43 AM · #
About 5 years I joined a 90%-American consulting firm as the only Brit. I’d spent a long time accruing righteous moral outrage about idiotic consultants with their idiotic jargon, and suddenly I had to contend with not only endless jargon-filled conversations but also people who (gasp!) couldn’t spell “colour” correctly or who flagrantly mispronounced “aluminium.” I would end each day seething at the latest abuse and battery of the English language, picking over the ruins of my lovingly nurtured pedantry.
So after five years, here’s what I learned: to borrow the language from Unsuck-It, I was the douchebag in this story. Language is not some cultural totem that can be frozen for all eternity to mark the zenith of our civilisation. It’s just a way of telling people stuff. Corporate jargon almost always exists for the same reason that medical or political or journalistic or computer jargon exists: because it means something very specific that can be more easily conveyed that way.
Some examples. “Leverage” is sometimes used in a way that means “use,” which is a bit annoying, I’ll admit, but mostly it means “use in combination with other things so that what happens when you do everything at once is more effective that would would happen if you used this thing and each, as-yet-undefined other thing independently such that their use did not affect each other.” An “action item” is an item (a task or collection of tasks) that requires action. Not really all that complicated, as concepts go. Not an “assignment” which, as some of your commenters note, implies that it’s assigned to someone (it may be, but the assigning of responsibility is something you do to an action item, in the same way that you take a dog for a walk, but “dog” and “dog-walking” aren’t synonymous). Asking an employee to be “proactive” means something along the lines of “do you think, perhaps for once in your lazy disinterested life, you could actually do something that clearly needs doing without waiting for someone to tell you to?” In this case, of course, one person’s “aggressive motivation” is another person’s desire not to miss opportunities and waste resources due to an employee’s refusal to take responsibility for doing anything.
I guess what I’m saying is that yes, it is important to make sure the person you’re talking to understands you, and like all jargon, corporate jargon can be used to play a tedious game of insider-outsider. But mostly, it’s just about using the right words for the right concepts. It’s the people who spend their time whinging about it that are the real douchebags.
— Mike · Apr 28, 05:14 AM · #
Mike,
Thanks – that is exactly what I was trying to describe.
Jim
— Jim Manzi · Apr 28, 09:50 PM · #
Mike,
I’m guessing you don’t really believe that an adult employee who has had his whole life to “do something that clearly needs doing without waiting for someone to tell [him] to,” but hasn’t yet availed himself of the chance, will suddenly respond when advised to be “proactive.”
Right, I know, you meant merely to twit a bit— take the piss, if you will!— of those of us who would grouse about the term, proactive. I sense, however, that underneath the exaggeration, your assumption about the employee’s laziness and disinterest reflects your own curdled point-of-view about certain workers as much as it does the hopeless in-proaction of those you’ve consulted.
Inevitably, there are indeed some employees who are stubborn, dumb, and lazy. But how interested, savvy and industrious, exactly, is the manager who aspires to motivate them with nothing better than a redundant wad of adjective?
Perhaps there’s a reason the employees are so uninspired. So is the boss.
Crabby as I’ve been, I actually think Manzi is right that the “Unsuck It” site is, well, kind of lazy and uninspired. Based on my random sampling, many of its picks of synonym are weak. However, the concept is great. It tries to make an antidote for the alienating, artificial stink that emanates from corporate lingo. I’m willing to wager a big hoppy Old Hooky that countless workers— not just the sloths— have suffered a whiff of it. At least now they have a website that provides a little respite. And by killing time on Unsuck It, they find yet another way to refuse to “take responsibility for doing anything,” thus keeping you busy borrowing lame phrases to vainly consult them into productivity.
— Hasil · Apr 29, 03:05 AM · #
Mike’s defence of the verb-form “leverage” provides a perfect illustration of my argument regarding the tendency of jargon to both fail to convey clear meanings and to obscure its own failure. Consider his definition of ‘leverage’:
Nobody charged with actually implementing a policy can use undefined things. Nobody charged with assessing the probable outcome of a course of action can calculate the effect of undefined, unnamed factors. At the same time, the verb-form “leverage” obscures this uncertainty. After all, two different teams might use the same word in the same context: one team might have a specific list of each resource they intended to use in combination, as well as the intended effects from the interaction of each. The other team might have identified only one resource, and have only the vaguest idea of the other resources they might use to improve their results. Both would have the same ability to use the word “leverage”; the word would obscure the difference between their proposals, which an assessor could only differentiate by going into the details of their analysis. But then why have the word at all? If jargon aims to convey actually useful information, what does “leverage” as used in this sense convey with any degree of reliability? And if you cannot rely on the information conveyed by a word, in what sense can you call it useful?
— John Spragge · Apr 29, 03:30 PM · #
Isn’t “leverage” in this sense a loan-word from finance? You take a low-risk low-reward bet and make it a high-risk high-reward one by borrowing huge amounts of resources. If we kept that in mind, it would caution us, especially in light of what happened to financial leverage.
— Pithlord · Apr 29, 10:16 PM · #
As all know, security camera system is very useful in our daily life. But if you want to buy a cheap Security Camera System or discount Security Camera System with good quality and service, please free contact D CCTV Security.
— DCCTV · May 6, 07:59 AM · #