Part 2

Bonjour Laziness: Why Hard Work Doesn't Pay
by Corinne Maier

(Page 2 of 3)

Business-speak considers grammar a relic of the past. It misuses circumlocution, distends syntax, mistreats words, and decks itself out in a gaudy array of technical and managerial terms. It corrupts language in masterly fashion: the business world loves malapropisms. For example, when you "decline" a logo, a message, or a value, you are not turning it down but merely adopting it for other uses, featured below. Nouns are turned into verbs as in "to access," or "to migrate" personnel from one department to another; intransitive verbs become transitive, as in "growing one's business."

The language of business expresses the politics of an impersonal power. It seeks neither to convince nor to prove, or even to seduce, but offers obvious statements in a uniform fashion without any value judgments. The goal? To make you obey. Beware: Joseph Goebbels, Hitler's right-hand man, once said, "We don't speak to communicate anything but to create a certain effect." And in fact, business newspeak is halfway between self-proclaimed scientific objectivity and the peremptory stridency of the slogan. Thus we get: "Interdepartmental cooperation must be optimized." "It is imperative that the new modus operandi be achieved by the deadline of the fifteenth." Or: "Implementing the orientations defined by the project are and will remain a priority."

Business-speak takes only the most well-traveled roads, where every twist and turn is familiar. Even if a text or memo says nothing, it can still be decoded: it reveals its meaning whenever it diverges from the secret code. Every deviation from the expected reveals something. So if you have nothing better to do, you can become an expert in jargon....

This language has a hold over us and claims to speak for us, reducing the employee to a simple piece of machinery. Get up, machine, and get to work! Your perceptions, your feelings, your ambition, must be translatable into spreadsheets and graphs, and your labor is but a "process" that must be rationalized.

Corrupting language is a costly affair. Our words seem to have been doctored. When it becomes difficult to disentangle truth and lies and to quash rumors, mistrust reigns. Not surprisingly, employees become paranoid that a vast plot is being hatched against them by top management. It's true: the bosses speak a language worthy of Pravda, the Soviet organ of official truth. But does this really mean they're up to no good? Sometimes it does, but sometimes there is a more innocent explanation: executives speak newspeak because they've been trained to, and they are chosen for certain positions of power on the basis of their mastery of this lingua franca. Jargonism is in their blood.

A training course in "native language" would be helpful in a number of our executive suites, but this is rarely on the syllabus of the executive MBA. They prefer neurolinguistic programming (NLP) and similarly half-baked approaches, whose primary objective is to keep everyone thinking and speaking in circles.

Acronyms: A Thicket, a Wilderness, Nay, a Veritable Labyrinth

If the newspeak of the business world is particularly repulsive, it is also because everybody speaks in abbreviations. While jargon has eliminated a certain number of words, it has also created a large number of them - especially those based on abbreviations and contractions - without a thought for how awful they sound. The names of units, groups, and departments are always acronyms. This is the sort of thing one hears at a meeting: "AGIR has become IPN, which supervises the STI, divesting the SSII of control of the DM, but the latter will waste no time in subsuming RTI." One hour of this sort of talk in the cafeteria is enough to drive you batty. The objective is to make those who know what the acronyms mean think that they belong to the privileged few, an inner circle who really knows what's what.

There's no point, however, in memorizing the meaning of these cryptic acronyms. They're changing all the time, in accordance with the successive restructurings aimed at reshuffling the cards without ever changing the deck - anything but! What this proliferation of abbreviations shows is that over the course of the many reorganizations and mergers/acquisitions, businesses become so complex and labyrinthine that you don't know whether you are coming or going. As a result, competition intensifies, responsibilities overlap, Russian dolls multiply. A progressive financial daily* summed up the phenomenon as follows: "We belong to the era of multiple cross-world ownership." Translation in plain talk: "The organization is a shambles."

There is a golden rule in the process of naming teams: each unit is named in such a way as to imply that its importance is vital to the firm, without being too explicit about what it actually does for fear of creating too much work. Most acronyms are formed with the same words, which include the following: "information," "technology," "support," "management," "development," "application," "data," "service," "direction," "center," "computer," "network," "research," "raccoon," "market," "product," "marketing," "consumer," and "client." You have one minute to find the one that doesn't belong in this list....

Copyright © 2005 by Corinne Maier.

About the Author

Corinne Maier works part-time as an economist for EDF, a French corporation. She is also a practicing psychoanalyst and the author of nine books. She lives in France.