Business Masala: Corporate strategy doublespeak

If you are unfortunate enough to be forced to read corporate strategy these days, you’ll probably come across lots of statements that would make Shakespeare turn and rollover and die again in his grave.

Here are a few reported gems by way of illustrating that corporate enterprises continue to use incomprehensible language – notably in their strategy documents.

These are certainly part of an attempt to disguise the fact that the authors really haven’t got a clue what to do.

Think that’s going too far? Try some of the following examples for size:

• “program of Deworkstationization”. Congratulations if you can even say that and go right to the top of the class if you know what it means. Chances are, the original author certainly doesn’t;
• “organically empathetic corporate harmonies”. Wow, have you ever heard anything so green, cuddly and ‘touchy-feely’ in your life? It almost makes you ashamed and politically-incorrect to have to admit that you haven’t a clue what it is trying to say;
• “trans-strategic socio-politic positioning”. It’s about this stage you might start to wonder if these sorts of things would make more sense in context. Well, if it makes you feel better, carry on hoping that;
• “development without constraints”. Fair enough, the author probably means ‘free-thinking’ but a cynic might say it means ‘development without a plan or framework’. In other words, they don’t know what to do;
• “realization of synergistic returns from client interactions and engagement”. If your tongue’s not causing you agony from having tried to say that, you might wonder if it couldn’t be said with one word – i.e. “profit”;
• “we will augment our human resource intellectual capital”. That sort of sounds like they’re planning to turn their people into cyborgs but it probably just means ‘training’. Pity though, might be nice to go home and say to your spouse or partner “hey, great news, today I was intellectually augmented!”;
• “de-emphasize monetary reward as a criterion of job satisfaction”. This one IS easy to understand – and it’s a real peach. It really means, you won’t be getting a pay rise in the foreseeable future;
• “strategic development must not be constrained by geo-political convention”. You can be fairly sure that this means there’s an excellent chance that your job and many like it, will shortly disappear overseas;
• “will seek to utilize non-location specific domain expertise”. It might mean overseas outsourcing but more likely it indicates that the board are planning to pay squillions to a firm of external consultants to produce, well, not very much really – other than some great corporate hospitality events;
• “recognition of the extant imperatives for progressive initiatives”. In other words, profits are down. The shareholders are rioting and threatening to lynch the board and they’re also demanding that someone does something to change things;
• “the company’s human capital will be deployed in new non-linear paradigms”. This is another classic piece of double-talk and basically means that you’re going to need to work harder and very probably on even more things at once that you currently do. It might also mean the extension of the existing policy of never being allowed to finish anything properly before being told to move on to the next crisis;
• “encourage conceptualization of green-field opportunities within an intra-participatory framework”. Translation – the board and their joined-at-the-hip consultants have run out of bright ideas and don’t know what to do. They’re so desperate, they’re considering asking their employees for ideas;
• “seeking to recognize opportunities for the strategic re-alignment of activities in strict accordance with strategic plan objectives”. Prepare for an in-house ‘night of the long knives’ and mass firings to save money.

Ok, there’s a lot of cynicism in the above but once upon a time, a wise old business head counseled their management protégés along the lines of:

“if you can’t say something simply then it means you’re either avoiding telling the truth or you just don’t know what you’re talking about. Whichever’s the case, I won’t tolerate it”.

It would be nice to think that such directness could again become the norm in corporate business and related strategies. Perhaps it will – just like those pigs flying by might one day land on your lawn.