Talk sense!
A MANAGEMENT education is expected to make people better managers and to oil the wheels of commerce till they hum with the joyous buzz denoting industry and the creation of wealth. In actuality, the main reason for such a specialised education is to school and train aspiring managers to be totally unintelligible to the rest of toiling humanity. Not sure what I mean?
Try this:
Moreover, devolution of profit and revenue responsibility is simply one aspect of methodological approaches to formulating survival strategies for the age of discontinuity.
Or:
In this regard, a constant flow of effective information requires considerable systems analysis and trade off studies to arrive at the philosophy of commonality and standardisation.
These illuminating statements extracted from a report I recently read, testifies to the penchant management professionals have to speak in a patois entirely their own. By this I mean each individual has his own code, which is as incomprehensible to his fellow-manager who in turn has his own. All their education at the highest - in- the- clouds institutions will not allow them mastery over another's cant, but it does teach them to quiveringly thrum with pent-up intelligence and look as if they understand the twaddle that has just been said.
I was told and then later shown by a friend a set of thirty words that are divided into three columns. All that is needed is to choose any three-figure number from 000-999. Having so chosen, wisely or otherwise, one selects the word corresponding to each of the numbers from the three columns and generate therewith a brand new phrase in chaste managementese. Phrases like: "Operationalise bleeding-edge transformation" and "Reengineer holistic value-chains" very soon become the new catch phrases that appear, fast and thick first in the trade journals and then in the media, till someone begins to find a wealth of meaning in the words. Once they become clichés, the magic grid is dusted off and another random selection is made and so on.
It is not unusual to have one's own phrase used `against' one sometimes. I have seen perpetrators reel like a man struck when assaulted by a phrase that they invented in one of their several idle moments.
Clarity of thought never seems to be truly welcome and convolution seems to be the flavour-of-the-decade. Five years ago, every thought and phrase in common parlance had the word `millennium' embedded somewhere. Buildings, plazas, housing colonies and even prize-winning dogs and horses were named using this word. Indeed, nobody was surprised when several babies were christened with the epithet regardless of gender - raising interesting questions on how to render them into several gender-centric Indian languages.
Clarity and lucidity have little importance in today's world and we are forever surprised by a new phrase that crawls out of the woodwork with the regularity of a metronome. But does it help and does it make life a little easier? Not really - especially since the growing need to be politically correct tends to obfuscate even more. Phrases like `differently abled' for `disabled' and `physically challenged' for `handicapped' often make me think why we cannot use phrases like `altitudinally challenged' for `short' or `equatorially enhanced' for `potbellied' just to hone our inventiveness. English is a growing, dynamic language, but managementese is a wildcat ready to pounce on hapless mortals like myself that wander the Earth in a constant haze of incomprehension.
Striving for understanding is one of the most enduring requirements of communication, and it would be well if more of us tried it and perhaps, in time, management professionals will know what other management professionals are talking about - perhaps, with luck they will know what they are talking about!
ARMITY GAUR
drwise@sify.com
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