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Business jargon we all hate

Business jargon we all hate, by Tom Cutler of "The Gentleman's Instant Genius Guide" fame. Only criticism? He missed a few (paradigm, helicopter view, push the envelope etc). Anyway, enjoy: Here are twenty-five examples of hideous business jargon, with notes, and translations into English. Where does this rubbish come from?

1. Going forward: ‘in future’ 2. Seamless: nonsense 3. Global: ‘offices in more than one country’ 4. Blue-sky thinking: nonsense 5. Change management: sugar-coated mass sackings 6. Implement: ‘do’ 7. Team leader: ‘upstart’ 8. Consultancy: ‘money for old rope’ 9. Team player: code for ‘lacklustre and useless’ 10. Not a team player: ‘rude, selfish, and unpleasant’ 11. Think outside the box: a cliché revealing the user to be thinking inside the box 12. Strategy: a military term, which generally just means ‘plan’ 13. Actioning: ‘doing’, or telling someone else to do 14. Escalate up: take something to the/a boss. The ‘up’ is redundant 15. Leveraging: just horrible – verbing nouns weirds language 16. Manage expectations: make sure X knows how useless you are 17. Turnkey solution: unutterable nonsense 18. Upskill: ‘train’ 19. Pushing the envelope: a maths term reduced to nonsense by ignoramuses 20. Best practice: not putting a live toaster in the bath with you 21. Enabler: lazy boss 22. Facetime: hideous nonsense 23. Repurpose: hammer in nail with screwdriver 24. Robust: likely to come apart at any moment 25. World-class: about as crappy as everyone else

UncategorizedJack Dyson Comments
The cat that walked by himself

A Just So story about the cat that walked by himself, by Rudyard Kipling [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9IbTHL-AXH8&w=700] EAR and attend and listen; for this befell and behappened and became and was, O my Best Beloved, when the Tame animals were wild. The Dog was wild, and the Horse was wild, and the Cow was wild, and the Sheep was wild, and the Pig was wild--as wild as wild could be--and they walked in the Wet Wild Woods by their wild lones. But the wildest of all the wild animals was the Cat. He walked by himself, and all places were alike to him.

Of course the Man was wild too. He was dreadfully wild. He didn't even begin to be tame till he met the Woman, and she told him that she did not like living in his wild ways. She picked out a nice dry Cave, instead of a heap of wet leaves, to lie down in; and she strewed clean sand on the floor; and she lit a nice fire of wood at the back of the Cave; and she hung a dried wild-horse skin, tail-down, across the opening of the Cave; and she said, 'Wipe you feet, dear, when you come in, and now we'll keep house.'

That night, Best Beloved, they ate wild sheep roasted on the hot stones, and flavoured with wild garlic and wild pepper; and wild duck stuffed with wild rice and wild fenugreek and wild coriander; and marrow-bones of wild oxen; and wild cherries, and wild grenadillas. Then the Man went to sleep in front of the fire ever so happy; but the Woman sat up, combing her hair. She took the bone of the shoulder of mutton--the big fat blade-bone--and she looked at the wonderful marks on it, and she threw more wood on the fire, and she made a Magic. She made the First Singing Magic in the world.

Out in the Wet Wild Woods all the wild animals gathered together where they could see the light of the fire a long way off, and they wondered what it meant.

Then Wild Horse stamped with his wild foot and said, 'O my Friends and O my Enemies, why have the Man and the Woman made that great light in that great Cave, and what harm will it do us?'

Wild Dog lifted up his wild nose and smelled the smell of roast mutton, and said, 'I will go up and see and look, and say; for I think it is good. Cat, come with me.'

'Nenni!' said the Cat. 'I am the Cat who walks by himself, and all places are alike to me. I will not come.'

'Then we can never be friends again,' said Wild Dog, and he trotted off to the Cave. But when he had gone a little way the Cat said to himself, 'All places are alike to me. Why should I not go too and see and look and come away at my own liking.' So he slipped after Wild Dog softly, very softly, and hid himself where he could hear everything. (click here to read the rest of this lovely story or just enjoy the reading at the top)

UncategorizedJack Dysoncat, cats, just so, marrow bones, origins of man, reading, rudyard kipling, shoulder of mutton, stories, story, wild, wild cherries, wild garlic, wild oxen, wild sheepComment
Mrs Allonby on The Ideal Man (from A Woman of No Importance)

(Oscar Wilde at his finest) MRS. ALLONBY: The Ideal Man! Oh, the Ideal Man should talk to us as if we were goddesses, and treat us as if we were children. He should refuse all our serious requests, and gratify every one of our whims. He should encourage us to have caprices, and forbid us to have missions. He should always say much more than he means, and always mean much more than he says. He should never run down other pretty women. That would show he had no taste, or make one suspect that he had too much. No; he should be nice about them all, but say that somehow they don't attract him. If we ask him a question about anything, he should give us an answer all about ourselves. He should invariably praise us for whatever qualities he knows we haven't got. But he should be pitiless, quite pitiless, in reproaching us for the virtues that we have never dreamed of possessing. He should never believe that we know the use of useful things. That would be unforgivable. But he should shower on us everything we don't want. He should persistently compromise us in public, and treat us with absolute respect when we are alone. And yet he should be always ready to have a perfectly terrible scene, whenever we want one, and to become miserable, absolutely miserable, at a moment's notice, and to overwhelm us with just reproaches in less than twenty minutes, and to be positively violent at the end of half an hour, and to leave us for ever at a quarter to eight, when we have to go and dress for dinner. And when, after that, one has seen him for really the last time, and he has refused to take back the little things he has given one, and promised never to communicate with one again, or to write one any foolish letters, he should be perfectly broken-hearted, and telegraph to one all day long, and send one little notes every half-hour by a private hansom, and dine quite alone at the club, so that every one should know how unhappy he was. And after a whole dreadful week, during which one has gone about everywhere with one's husband, just to show how absolutely lonely one was, he may be given a third last parting, in the evening, and then, if his conduct has been quite irreproachable, and one has behaved really badly to him, he should be allowed to admit that he has been entirely in the wrong, and when he has admitted that, it becomes a woman's duty to forgive, and one can do it all over again from the beginning, with variations.

UncategorizedJack Dysona woman of no importance, comedy, ideal man, monologues, mrs allonby, oscar wilde, theatre, womenComment
A line-storm song, by Robert Frost 
The line-storm clouds fly tattered and swift,  
  The road is forlorn all day,  
Where a myriad snowy quartz stones lift,  
  And the hoof-prints vanish away.  
The roadside flowers, too wet for the bee,
  Expend their bloom in vain.  
Come over the hills and far with me,  
  And be my love in the rain.  

The birds have less to say for themselves  
  In the wood-world’s torn despair
Than now these numberless years the elves,  
  Although they are no less there:  
All song of the woods is crushed like some  
  Wild, easily shattered rose.  
Come, be my love in the wet woods; come,
  Where the boughs rain when it blows.  

There is the gale to urge behind  
  And bruit our singing down,  
And the shallow waters aflutter with wind  
  From which to gather your gown.     
What matter if we go clear to the west,  
  And come not through dry-shod?  
For wilding brooch shall wet your breast  
  The rain-fresh goldenrod.  

Oh, never this whelming east wind swells    
  But it seems like the sea’s return  
To the ancient lands where it left the shells  
  Before the age of the fern;  
And it seems like the time when after doubt  
  Our love came back amain.       
Oh, come forth into the storm and rout  
  And be my love in the rain.

[youtube=http://youtu.be/0QM1QdRpFxU&w=700]

UncategorizedJack Dysonlove, poem, poetry, robert frost, sigur rosComment
Opportunity from crisis, lemonade from lemons, art from a burgled computer

Good spot by James Pomerantz in the New Yorker, all very WeiJi:

When life give you lemons, make lemonade. When someone breaks into your home and steals your computer, make a collaborative photo project. That’s what Melanie Willhide did.

Willhide dedicates “To Adrian Rodriguez, with Love” to the individual who broke into her home and stole various things. Her computer was recovered by the police, but the hard drive had been wiped clean. Willhide attempted to recover the erased data but found her digital photographs corrupted. Lemons! Rather than delete the images, Willhide considered these corrupted files a collaboration with her machine. She refined them and made additional ones inspired by the mess. Lemonade!

The series opened on 23 Feb at Von Lintel Gallery, in New York. Go and see it if you can (sneak preview below - click an image to activate the slideshow).

 

[gallery]

UncategorizedJack Dysonart, burglar, corrupted, crisis, hard drive, opportunity, photography, theftComment
Read this if you want to write - A Tribute to Marie Colvin

John Cassidy wrote this in The New Yorker. It's a tribute to Marie Colvin, war reporter for The Sunday Times, who died in Syria last week.

In May, 2003, I travelled around Iraq reporting on its oil industry. Before reaching Baghdad, I got in touch with Marie Colvin, who was there covering the war and its aftermath for the Sunday Times, where I worked from 1986 to 1993. She wrote back to say that she was staying at a hunt club in the neighborhood of Mansour: the temporary headquarters of Ahmad Chalabi, the controversial Iraqi exile, darling of the neocons.

I didn’t know where Mansour was, and the idea of a hunt club in the middle of Baghdad struck me as a bit bizarre. But the news that Marie was staying there didn’t shock me. If she’d said she was hiding out with Saddam Hussein and his son Uday, I wouldn’t have been overly surprised.

It turned out that the hunt club was pretty well known. Before the war, which had only been finished a few weeks, Uday, or one of his brothers, had had some sort of connection with it. When I arrived, there was nobody about except a few of Chalabi’s heavily armed guards. I told one of them that I had come to see Marie. He said she was in the garden and led me through the building and into a nicely maintained half acre, with flower beds, a patio, and a huge stone head of Saddam, which had been removed from a statue. We walked down a path to a small brick building, which looked a bit like an oversized garden shed, and knocked on the door. Marie opened it.

As I recall, it was one room with a cot in one corner and a sink in another. Along a wall, next to the window, there was a chair, a table, a laptop computer, and a bottle of Scotch. There might have been a small stove; I can’t remember. Marie said cheerfully that until she moved in, Chalabi’s guards had been using the space to interrogate former members of Saddam’s regime about the whereabouts of W.M.D. and other matters. I said I hoped they’d finished, and she said they had; nobody bothered her here.

It was like a scene from a Graham Greene novel. Marie, except for the fact she was female, was very much a Greene character: wry, nicotine stained, almost ludicrously brave. By her standards this was a cushy assignment. Since before the war had started, she’d been travelling with Chalabi’s party. The exact details escape my mind. I think they’d been in Kurdistan for a time, and then, once Saddam fell, they came down to Baghdad. How long was she staying? She said she didn’t know. She never did. But it was sure to be a while.

As were many other reporters, Marie was on the trail of the W.M.D., which never turned up, and of Saddam, who did. By staying close to Chalabi, she was hoping to get a tipoff. She was also doing other stuff. The next day she was driving out to look at a mass grave, where some of Saddam’s victims were said to be buried. She asked if I wanted to go with her. I said I had urgent business—at the oil ministry.

After a while, Chalabi returned, and we had drinks in the garden with a couple of other reporters who’d shown up. It was a bizarrely sedate scene. Apart from Chalabi’s guards patrolling the garden perimeter with their AK-47s primed, and the calls to prayer from a nearby super-mosque that Saddam had built to appease his populace, we could have been virtually anywhere.

Marie was clearly on good terms with Chalabi and his honchos. She was never a press-office reporter. In the places she operated in—the Middle East, mainly—the only way to find out what was going on was to get to know the major players and win their confidence. Some whispered that she got too close to her sources. That was just jealous gossip. Working for nearly thirty years on a weekly paper that prides itself on making news, she was a one-woman scoop machine. And many of her biggest stories had nothing to do with playing the access game. From the besieged Burj el-Barajneh refugee camp in Lebanon during the late nineteen-eighties to the embattled streets of Homs, she somehow slipped into hellholes other journalists couldn’t or wouldn’t reach and told the world what was happening there.

She had scores of stories. Not that she volunteered them unless asked. This is one she told me. Years back in Tripoli, she got exclusive access to Qaddafi, who was then in his pomp. The night before the interview, some of the Libyan leader’s security personnel awoke her in her hotel room. They ushered in some nurses, who said they wanted to examine her, presumably for signs of infectious diseases. She shooed them away. The next day she did the interview, which overran its allotted time in the usual Middle East fashion. That night, or maybe it was the next night, the security men and nurses returned. This time they wanted to take blood. Marie decided it was time to return to London.

Then there were the times she was running through fields in Chechnya being strafed by Russian warplanes, and, in Sri Lanka, getting caught up in firefights with Tamil Tigers. It was there that she lost her eye. She didn’t talk about it much, but she hadn’t really wanted to go. It wasn’t her part of the world: she didn’t know the topography, the history, or the local characters. But when the foreign editor asked her to fill in and cover the story, she went.

The last time I saw her, she was swinging through New York to see her folks out in Oyster Bay and pick up a journalism award. She won lots of them, and, even after all her years in London, she remained enough of an American to take them reasonably seriously. Despite her tough-cookie exterior, she had never succumbed to the Fleet Street disease: cynicism. As the editor of the Sunday Times, John Witherow, said in a statement yesterday, she was “driven by a passion to cover wars in the belief that what she did mattered. She believed profoundly that reporting could curtail the excesses of brutal regimes and make the international community take notice. Above all, as we saw in her powerful report last weekend, her thoughts were with the victims of violence.”

Only Tuesday, in an interview with the BBC from Homs, she described the death of a young child from shrapnel wounds. I didn’t hear the report; I had no idea she was there. But when I saw the tragic news yesterday morning, I can’t honestly say I was surprised. Part of me believed Marie had nine lives and would die in her bed of old age. But that’s just something you tell yourself about friends who repeatedly put themselves in peril. On any objective scale, Marie was living dangerously. Of course she was in Homs. Where else would she have been?

As I drove to the ice rink with my wife and kids up here in Vermont, where we are spending a few days’ vacation, I thought about the choices we all make. Marie made hers many years ago, devoting her life to being a war correspondent. Everything else—her health, her family, her personal life—came second. Naturally, she sometimes thought of doing something else, something less crazy. At our last lunch, she spoke in her throaty-voiced way about the possibility of writing a book and dialing it back—maybe getting a gig at a think tank or a journalism school. I think we both knew she’d never do it. Many moons ago, she quit reporting for a while and spent a couple of years on the Sunday Times foreign desk, rewriting copy and managing other reporters. She nearly died of boredom.

Before very long, she was back on another plane, heading into another danger zone. “In an age of 24/7 rolling news, blogs and twitters, we are on constant call wherever we are,” she said in a 2010 speech. “But war reporting is still essentially the same—someone has to go there and see what is happening. You can’t get that information without going to places where people are being shot at, and others are shooting at you.”

We all have to die sometime. Marie died doing what she loved, what made her feel most alive, what turns journalism from a job into something bigger and more noble: a mission. It’s perhaps not much of a consolation to her many friends and her family, but it’s what happened.

UncategorizedJack Dysonahmad chalabi, john cassidy, journalism, marie colvin, war reporter, war reporting, writingComment