How to get ahead with buzzwords
Matthew Wright is an historian from New Zealand. He’s also incredibly funny with a biting wit that will make you laugh out loud. If you’ve ever worked in corporate, you will LOVE this post.
I worked for many years in corporate communications. The organisation ran on buzzwords. They were amazing ways to get ahead. All you had to do was invoke them and you were in.
When I joined, the buzzword was ‘budgeting’. Everything had to be budgeted, meaning properly planned and costed ahead of time. However, most of the managers took it to mean ‘cut-back’. One outcome was that I ended up sharing a desk phone with the person next to me because it ‘saved money’ (the phone I’d had, which had already been paid for, was taken away).
The following year the buzzword changed to ‘management’. This involved people asserting that they were managing the place. Nothing else changed, although late in the year I noticed trucks driving around Wellington labelled ‘waste management’. Clearly there was so much management about that some of it was being thrown away.
After a while…
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