Those who 'circle back' and 'synergize' also tend to be crap at their jobs Workers who believe "leveraging cross-functional synergies" sounds profound may want to rethink their career trajectory because a new study suggests people who fall for corporate word salad also tend to perform worse at their jobs. Researchers from Cornell University have developed what they call "the Corporate Bullshit …
One wonders how much grant money this "study" managed to elicit.
Seriously, we've been laughing at this corporate bombastic bullshit for as long as I can remember. The first "boardroom bingo" cards I remember were run off on either a mimeograph or spirit duplicator, long before "xerox" became a verb.
I think this study is less about the bullshit bingo itself, but far more a genuine confirmation of what we all suspected. Those that drink the Koolaid, are generally crap at their jobs.
I think we all have suspected as much on many occasions, but it is nice to have that officially confirmed (well as officially as you can get fro trick cyclists).
I think I will be forwarding this article to a few select people around the office. I wonder if they'll recognise themselves... :P
Keep in mind: The ORIGINAL Dunning Kruger effect is neutral and applies to all who know that there is always more on any topic. These are the scientific style thinkers.
HOWEVER the popular science variant of the Dunning Kruger effect, which you refer to, plays a much bigger role than any science minded person would want, but cannot do anything about it.
Of course "drink the Koolaid" is yet another cliche jargon term.
To paraphrase the 1960s band Buffalo Springfield, "Jargonitis strikes deep, into your life, it will creep."
> I think I will be forwarding this article to a few select people around the office. I wonder if they'll recognise themselves...
To resort to another cliche, "We have met the enemy and he is us."
> Seriously, we've been laughing at this corporate bombastic bullshit for as long as I can remember.
The key point here is that not only do some people not laugh when faced with a torrent of buzzwords, but they're also perhaps a bit more gullible than most.
The kind of people you perhaps want to see working on your customer's procurement team, rather than your own...
After first checking the date to see it wasn't April 1st, I'd say this is pretty much on the money. After 30-odd years of working in corporate environments the level of bullshit bingo you have to plough through on a regular basis is just staggering, and I have never understood why there is this blind insistence on using such shitty wording in the first place when using plain English is just more straightforward and less vague. It really does look like a lot of the people using this bullshittery are only doing it to make themselves seem better than they are without actually saying anything. And yes, the work colleagues who lapped this word salad up were pretty mediocre in their jobs as well.
I think the literal translation is "find a way to benefit from people who know how to do more than one thing by having them coordinate between people who are good at one of their areas of expertise". It's not the worst suggestion, but, in my experience, most who say it in the jargony way don't know how to implement it and some don't know what they've said so they can't try.
> the level of bullshit bingo you have to plough through on a regular basis is just staggering
Nod. Most of the all-team meetings I've been in and found inspiring have been the plain-speaking ones.
One that should have been among them fell flat when one speaker described the corporate next step as "getting our foot in the door higher up the food chain"[1]. A small group of us that met in the kitchen afterward had fun depicting that on a whiteboard there.
[1] "House!"
"All team meetings" implies that all of the participants are going to have to go back to their desks and work with the decisions made. Of course you want the work to be clearly defined. In my experience, corporate-speak comes about when some "leader-like entity" attempts to sell an idea to the team and wants to short stop any further discussion (and possible objections).
And don't just 'call' or 'contact'.
Many moons ago when I was still a cog in the corporate BS machine there was a conference call led by a middle manager, and hundreds of techies from her organisation attended it. After the call, one of them told me he had no clue wtf she was going on about. I think I got maybe half of it.
Yeah - reach out really pisses me off. I had a boss who used it all the time. He was a decent bloke and one day I told him that babies reach out, adults ask. It didn't stop him using it but sometimes, in the right situation, when he used it I used to raise my arms like a baby wanting to be picked up.
We should start basing software releases on Phrygian Half Cadence and add a management dashboard widget to display a real-time analysis of releases to QA based on Tagg's Model Logistics*
* total bollocks, I just looked up some fancy words, but it'll be fun to see how quickly it spreads and becomes "industry standard" in the boardroom.
"In the 70s it was used by bicyclists"
I still is. It's a valid word in the non-business world, I think it's used for the rotational speed of your pedals which plays a massive part in your performance on a bike, not to mention how important the term is to musicians and voice artists. When the corporate BS artists adopt a term it poisons it for the rest of us.
Cadence is also a musical term. As well a call and response used in conjunction with military activities (some which cannot be repeated on this web site).
We probably have to divide terms into ones we don't like but are valid using their previous definitions and ones that actually don't mean anything people can agree on. Whether you like it or not, cadence has a lot of uses related to frequency and rhythm. It's been used that way in music and bicycling as others have pointed out, and it's also used in engineering (especially when referring to machines that have repetitive motion), foot races, and fencing. Someone referring to a "monthly cadence" may sound annoying, but that's one of the things that the word means; they didn't invent that. There is a marked difference between people who phrase themselves weirdly and people who probably aren't saying anything at all and are using big words to hide that.
If you use the word "cadence" when not referring to the design software then you need a slap round the chops.
And don't get me started on "stakeholders". Count Dracula's enemies, perhaps. People who are part of a RACI matrix for a project? Nah.
(Of course, using 'RACI' might put me in the crosshairs too but it's a damned sight more precise than 'stakeholders').
"The findings, described in a recent study, suggest that employees who rate this sort of language as insightful are more likely to struggle with analytical thinking and workplace decision-making."
This defines where the word salad comes from ... people who cannot think analytically BUT need to communicate 'something' to their minions ... hence create a long-winded word salad that sounds convincing to the ears of the speaker and to few others, the managers and similar who are looking up at the role they covet will nod as if it makes sense and try to pass the message on to prove their loyalty to the speaker.
"Send Three & four pence we are going to a dance."
:)
need to communicate 'something' to their minions
I've had managers where the team's, and individual employees' annual objectives wouldn't have a single meaningful verb in them.
Good managers/companies would have objectives like:
- Deliver new XYZ feature to production by 3Q
- Deliver with zero safety issues
- Have less than 10 severity one issues per project
- Repair all severity one issues within 48 hours
Bad managers/companies would have objectives like:
- Respect the BLP development process
- Embrace the Agile development plan
- Ensure that all SIFW group outputs are equitable
When we asked the managers how they could evaluate whether we "respected" or "embraced" something, or whether an output was "equitable", they had no idea. Usually they said that they didn't write those objectives; they were handed to them from their superiors and just passed them on. When it came time to evaluate the employee, they just ignored the objects, because no one knew what they meant.
Unsurprisingly, companies run on gibberish were terribly run, because they had no idea what they were doing.
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"People who scored higher on the Corporate Bullshit Receptivity Scale tended to perform worse on tests measuring analytical thinking, cognitive reflection, and fluid intelligence."
"Analytical thinking" is fine. "Cognitive reflection", border-line but surely "fluid intelligence" must be one of their test phrases that escaped and was slotted in to see what the paper's audience made of it.
They mention a feedback loop. The worst feedback loop isn't that, it's the fact that those who fall for the bullshit are the ones that get promoted to spout more of it themselves, the rest of us are in the awkward squad. I've long held what I call the workers and wankers hypothesis of how employees divide. Each type, in charge, will appoint and promote its own but there's a distinct risk that a wanker will get promoted by mistake and when that happens the business is doomed because they'll eventually take over and there'll be nobody left to do the work.
"cognitive reflection" is "introspection" after a quick passage through the entrails of corporate crap machine.
"fluid intelligence" either a "brilliant" manglement idea conceived after a liquid lunch or a the result of an Ebola like virus liquifying manglement brain — differential diagnosis always problematic.
The terms sound a bit odd but they do have proper definitions (worth a gander imho).
I worked on site for a major City of London stockbroker firm (not naming them coz they are really famous). Anyway, one day the client boss I reported to arrived at my workstation and asked to look at my Internet favourites folder. Now, I had never actually used the Internet from that client site as it was not relevant to my job (the browser history was empty). He found it quite quickly and it was full of porn sites. The SysAdmin who had set up the profiles for me and my contractor colleagues had used his own profile and forgotten to 'sanitise it'. He left soon after.
D'Oh icon as even SysAdmins can be stupid sometimes.
You need to sound impressive when you intend to herd the cattle to conform to your ways. You treat them like children with bombastic language and gestures to be impressive in form but are completely non-committal and conveying no real content.
It really should be seen in the divide and conquer scheme, where you appease the large(st) flock with bullshit and create an environment where dissent is suppressed and self censuring is encouraged and enforced. If effect, it is all about power and control.
Precisely.
This and the comment by Bullchut ( or whatever the name was) encapsulate the issue.
BS corporate language is used to sound impressive and managerial while not betraying inadequacy by actually saying anything. They want to rally the troops and sound important while actually being hollow barrels.i.e. Inside the words there is nothing of substance. These are the people who are quick to spot the newest trend and jump onto it, forcing others to join them- but more importantly are the quickest to spot the end of that trend and the start of the next one, jumping across at the first inkling while leaving the poor sods who followed them to take the consequences.
Education managers and Local Authorities' management are full of this shit. I have quite literally seen careers ruined for teachers and LA staff who have been dragged into some such nonsense, committed their careers to some Next Best Thing that the senior managers were promoting strenuously while spouting high-sounding but meaningless jargon, then had been left high and dry when the political support, funding and commitment suddenly dried up.
Does that sound angry? It should. Because I have in mind one of many of these, who was brought from the other side of the world to promote some such scheme that was big back home* and we were going to implement here. Then found that before she'd even got her bum on her chair they were already backtracking and suddenly no one wanted to speak to her.
Several times through my own career we'd had to fight off the local authority hijacking our team to support some new idiot scheme that would solve all problems and mean our team's actual work would no longer be needed. It never did, of course.
And we witnessed one such luminary who'd been promoting some scheme or other with biblical fervour turn up one afternoon ( with her PowerPoint of course) to explain how some new system was the right one, and that it had been obvious for years that the old scheme was not fit for purpose. The scheme she'd been advocating as the only way forward less than two weeks earlier.
*It wasn't rocket science and we'd already read up on it and worked out that it was impossible to implement without increasing teacher, advisory and support staff numbers by about 30%
For many years, we had this posted on the wall in the server room. A constant reminder to us "Workers" that if we saw something as being shit, we would make sure we said it was shit:
The Plan
In the beginning was the plan. And then came the Assumptions. And the Assumptions were without form.
And the Plan was without substance.
And darkness was upon the face of the Workers. And they spoke among themselves, saying,
"It is a crock of shit, and it stinketh."
And the Workers went unto their Supervisors and said,
"It is a pail of dung, and none may abide the odour thereof."
And the Supervisors went unto their Managers, saying,
"It is a container of excrement, and it is very strong,
such that none may abide by it."
And the Managers went unto their Directors, saying,
"It is a vessel of fertilizer, and none may abide its strength."
And the Directors spoke amongst themselves,
saying one to another,
"It contains that which aids plant growth, and it is very strong."
And the Directors then went unto the Vice-Presidents,
saying unto them,
"It promotes growth, and it is very powerful."
And the Vice-Presidents went unto the President,
saying unto him,
"This new plan will actively promote the growth and vigour
of the company, with powerful effects."
And the President Looked upon the Plan,
and saw that it was good.
And the Plan became Policy.
From TFA: "[T]he employees most impressed by corporate jargon were also the ones least likely to think critically about it." And also "tend to be crap at their jobs", per the subtitle.
Another study, definitely reported by El Reg in the past though I can't be bothered to find a reference, showed that critical thinking was negatively correlated with enthusiasm about AI "revolutionizing everything".
Hmmm...
Leveraging our **core competencies** to drive a **paradigm shift** in the ecosystem requires us to synergize our cross-functional workstreams and operationalize our high-level vision. By leaning into a **customer-centric flywheel** and socializing our key learnings, we can proactively bridge the gap between our strategic North Star and tactical execution. We aren't just moving the needle; we are **reimagining the vertical** through a holistic, agile lens to ensure total stakeholder alignment and maximize our mission-critical ROI.
By leaning into a **customer-centric flywheel**
I like this one! But having successfully escaped the corporate treadmill, I won't get the chance to build one and put words into action. No matter how tempting that might be to build one so it could be used as an object lesson. Most engineers with a desire to exit this world with much the same complement of bodyparts as they entered it would know that large flywheels are best avoided, not leant on. Especially if I'd coated it with abrasives, or teeth.
But one of my favorite activities (when HR allowed it) was firing people who claimed to be effective communicators on their CV. There's only so much word salad I can stomach before turning team players into meat. If businesses would read fewer 'management' books and more Terry Pratchett, they'd be far more efficient. Lord Vetinari is the only business guru one really needs, and "Si non confectus, non reficiat" is still a very fine motto.
[Sound of ringing phone]
"Hello, this is Assassins 'R Us. Who can we kill today?"
"Some bloke called mdubash. Directly responsible for the death of billions of brain cells round the world with just one post. Make it painful!"
"Right you are sir. Can I recommend an upgrade to our Public Premium Service for just the low price of £10000?"
"Go on then. Going deeply into debt will be worth it!"
As an ex-tech journalist, I used to have to sit through corporate presentations (no, no sympathy, please!).
The Yanks in particular drove me bonkers with their constant use of metaphors, many of which related only to US sports and related jargon. It took significant time to unpack what the speaker was attempting to convey. by which time he (and it was always 'he') had moved on a couple of paragraphs and I had to play catch-up with the next suitcase-full of jargon.
I worked at a bank where executive management required every team to write their own mission statement. We thought it was silly, but we were ordered to make one, so we did. Oddly enough, we actually found it surprisingly useful to have.
A mission statement answers the questions "What are we doing?", and "What are we trying to achieve?". A good mission statement answers both questions, preferably in as short and concise a manner as possible.
In our case, we were a trading floor R&D group. We declared our mission statement was "research and investigate new technologies to design and build the best possible trading floor". Once we had that defined, we found ourselves quoting it when interviewing new hires, when explaining to other groups what we were doing, and when talking to vendors trying to get them to give us evaluation units. It was also surprisingly useful in shielding us from having work dumped on us from other groups, on the grounds that it was outside of our mission.
In contrast, when we asked one of the finance guys what his group did, he walked us over to his work area, and showed us a plaque on the wall with their mission statement. It was a firehose of buzzwords about how they were embracing this, deconstructing that, and defending a third thing in order to respect something else.
Not one person in his department could recite their mission statement without reading it. Not one of them could say how what he was doing that day helped achieve that mission. There wasn't a single quantifiable word in their mission.
No one could say what it meant, which just showed that it didn't mean anything.
An exec later told me that the reason they asked groups to write their own mission statements was to see which groups actually knew what they were doing. If a group couldn't write a mission statement describing what it was doing, they probably don't know. If they couldn't describe what they were trying to achieve, they likely weren't achieving much.
Unfortunately "firehose of buzzwords" was the norm. Groups with clear, comprehensible mission statements like ours were the exception.
On the upside, when layoff season arrived a few months later, they spared all the groups with builders, designers, and engineers, and culled the recontextualizers, incubators, orchestrators, and incentivizors. Apparently a few weeks prior to the layoffs, some moles went around asking various people to explain their mission statement meant. People who couldn't, and/or didn't know what it was went into the layoff pile. Those of use that could were put in the "they know what they're doing" pile.
Workers who use phrases like 'synergizing paradigms' usually love it because they don't know what they're doing, and they're trying to hide that fact by using terms that aren't quantifiable. Just as people who can't define success will never succeed, they can't be accused of failing, either.
"Workers who use phrases like 'synergizing paradigms' usually love it because they don't know what they're doing, and they're trying to hide that fact by using terms that aren't quantifiable."
.. or are actively avoiding actual work. I've been reading old Dilberts and that's literally what Wally does all the time: Synergizing paradigms.
What it means? No-one knows, but it counts as work.
According to Scott Adams, Wally was based on an actual engineer he knew that wanted a layoff package. He was a brilliant engineer but completely mercenary. He'd never do anything that would get him fired, but he deliberately kept his productivity low enough so that management had no reason to keep him, either.
He was the living embodiment of malicious compliance.
The difference between Wally and the 'synergizing paradigms' people is that Wally knew what he was doing, was capable of producing good work, and simply chose not to. Not only could he quantify his work, he did so in a very calculating way, intentionally producing outputs that were just good enough that he couldn't be fired, but bad enough that they'd want him to leave.
The BS people aren't like that. They have no idea what they are doing.
I worked at a company where people referred to the executive suite as "Cargo Cult Management" because they used the same words as successful companies, but they had no idea what they actually meant.
The BS people are even worse. They don't even know what the words mean, so they make up their own.
I much prefer your mission statement over the buzzword-laden versions I've seen from far too many others. However, it's still not very useful, just not painful. Your version says about as much as the team name does. You switched "development" to "design and build" and added a synonym for research. If the mission statement was supposed to have any value, I'd want a clearer statement of "best possible" [on which aspects, within what limits]. If those were difficult to specify, and in my experience they change a lot so perhaps that's true, then it's difficult to have a mission statement that says anything.
We discussed a number of the issues you raised.
First of all, we weren't officially an R&D group. The group splintered off from a larger group that supported existing trading floors. We got sent to other cities to install trading floors there, and sometimes we found efficiencies and did upgrades. After about a year, even though we were still officially part of a "support" group, senior management broke us out into our own (smaller) group.
And "best possible" was clear. The problem is that we were doing trading floors in Canada, and the US, and the UK, and Germany, and Singapore, and Hong Kong, and etc. Every country had different laws, technologies, and requirements. A New York trading floor would work in Vancouver, but it wouldn't be the best solution for Vancouver, for many Vancouver-specific reasons. A Berlin floor solution wouldn't be best for London, and vice versa, etc.
We played with adding qualifiers, but once we started, it never stopped. "Best possible for the country" meant ignoring regional differences in large countries like the US. "Best technology" wasn't accurate, because while 90% of the time the technology was key, but about 10% of the time, cultural differences made the best technical decision the wrong choice.
The aspects and limits you mention weren't universal. They were defined by the business case for the individual floor. In some floors, live video feeds were absolutely essential, and a lot of resources were spent deciding whether to put TVs around the floor, or to integrating then inside individual trader's workstations. On other floors, the mandate was "video is distracting, we don't want it". Telephony differed massively, as did security requirements.
In other words, what was "best" had to be defined on a floor by floor basis. The mission statement had to be flexible enough to allow us to adapt to the times. The original floors predated the internet; if we'd explicitly included MS Mail (which was the solution on the first floors), we'd be stuck with it a decade later.
Fair enough. You clearly put a lot of thought into it. I'm still not convinced a mission statement is any good. It sounds like all you needed, and in fact mostly what you did, was changing the team name to "floor R&D". The rest of the mission statement was basically "Do R&D well for the correct value of well at the time", and I hope that's sufficiently obvious that most management would not need it stated that you didn't aim to do the job badly. It does seem like being more specific would not have been possible for your case.
We needed a mission state because we were ordered to provide one, so we did.
None of us had any idea what to do, so our boss went out and bought a book by Guy Kawasaki, the Apple guy, who had helped them do theirs, and we all read it. That's why we started asking ourselves "what does our group actually do?" and tried to describe it in the simplest possible terms.
If you were around back then, many of the big companies had mission statement that actually differentiated them now. Microsoft's was "information at your fingertips. Apple's (after the Mac) was "computers for the rest of us". Sun's was "the network is the computer". Today, Sun is no more, Apple is a cell vendor whose computer business is just a sideline, and no one is sure what they hell direction Microsoft has, but many know they don't like it.
Our group had developed organically to solve a problem. We'd basically started as a firefighting team to deal with an emergency, and then just kept growing. The question was, what reason did we have to exist when we weren't installing trading floors? Sure, we were kept busy for years, but what happened if there was an inevitable lull? Without a floor to install/fire to fight, and more importantly without a budget, we'd likely be split up and absorbed by other groups. And then a year later, when a new floor was mandated in Singapore or wherever, a new team would have to be built, with all of our collective expertise not available.
By declaring ourselves as an R&D group as well as a deployment and installation team, our management could justify keeping us together when the (rare) lull happened. If we had a two month breather between projects, that was the time to deep dive into new technology for firewalls, phone integration, or virtualization that we might be able to deploy on future floors.
As for what's obvious to management, keep in mind that 80% of the teams were saying they were 'reconextualizing frictionless markets' or other eye-glazing nonsense. If we'd provided an equally nonsensical statement, it was a sign to management that we weren't worth funding.
"pressure-test a renewed level of adaptive coherence."
I cannot help hearing, in the wonderful voice of the late Paul Eddington as the Rt. Hon. Jim Hacker, MP after a particularly long and winding speech from Sir Humphrey Appleby, his permanent secretary:
"But what does it mean , Humphrey?"
The findings, described in a recent study, suggest that employees who rate this sort of language as insightful are more likely to struggle with analytical thinking and workplace decision-making.
I once worked in a job where everyone above me in my chain of command spoke in business-style word-salad mode. Once they had little cards printed up for everyone which illustrated the seven (or was it nine?) "pillars" of "our core values".
We had quarterly all-IT meetings in which upper management made talk-talk sounds, accompanied by PowerPoint decks showing unrelated things as being in hierarchical relationships.
Is there a specific word for nonsensical diagrams in PowerPoint decks?
> Is there a specific word for nonsensical diagrams in PowerPoint decks?
Untufted?
Will make sense (well, hopefully will make sense) to anyone who has read Edward Tufte's work, especially his 2003 "The Cognitive Style of Power Point"[1], which was incorporated as a chapter into his 2006 book "Beautiful Evidence".
For everyone else, a well-tufted product is hard-wearing, resilient and doesn't fall apart as soon as you grab it and give it a good shake.
And for the Special Few, you can simply say "Tufty!" and distract them with a squirrel.
PS
I'm aware that bringing up Tufte's work can raise a few hackles, but dang it, at least then we're talking about the subject; too many books titled "infographics this that and the other" just get read in silence, turning pages and looking at pretty pictures, then put down and never mentioned again.
[1] which title does start to sound a bit buzzwordish, even though he is using the words correctly; OTOH that might itself encourage the buzzword-inclined to pick it up.
One place I worked had a CEO who was full of these buzzwords, to an extent bordering on insanity. To say that very few people further down in the business respected him was an understatement, if anything he was perceived as a incompetent joke.
About two years later he was replaced with someone who didn't use anywhere near the same level of corporate bollocks, and generally was far more to the point during meetings and company pronouncements.
It was very noticeable how much better morale was around the building, and generally there was a perception that the execs were doing a decent job compared to the team under the previous CEO.
https://www.quotes.net/serp.php?st=gus%2Bhedges&qtype=2
"Could we interlock brain spaces in my work area?"
"I'd just like you to stir-fry a few ideas in my think-wok."
"Just a thought I wanted to pop into your fishbowl to see if it blows bubbles."
"There is just something I'd like to pop into your percolator, see if it comes out brown."
I like to use the words "what does that actually mean?"
having come up in IT & not being scared of looking stupid, i'm quite happy to ask "what the hell are those acronyms?!" & especially to sales people...." can you explain how your product does what it says it does?"
I'm tired of this corporate wankery that comes out of idiots like mckinsey & accenture. The ability to not care if you look stupid to these people is a superpower as 9 times out of 10 THEY have no idea what they are talking about & just spouting nonsense they read somewhere.
By stating the obvious this study doesn't add anything to what we already know. We're all very polite about it because this sort of verbiage might be excruciating but its also one of the more useful tools that we use to tell ordinary people from BS artists. Nobody talks about it because blowing the gaff like this could be regarded as a major intelligence failure -- once word gets about the BS won't actually stop, it be merely reformulated into a style that might be less easy and reliable to work with. Maybe we'll get lucky?
Incidentally, a couple of decades ago one of my sisters in law was working as a consultant to a Swedish paper making conglomerate**. They'd recently acquired a quarrying concern and she (the s-i-l) was telling me that she was searching for a 'synergy' between the two business. I suggested a further acquisition of a scissors manufacturer. This fell flat, alas. (C-Suite types don't do humor.)
(**Rolling paper products like toilet paper / bathroom tissue onto cardboard tubes at speed is actually an exquisite mechanics problem.....who'd have thought it?)
In English quarry is odd as can be a noun or a verb (noun describes the big ole in the ground, to quarry is to extract material)
.. quarrying can be seen as present participle (verb) e.g. you can say people are quarrying or gerund (noun) - referring to the indiustry
English can be horribly perverse & I'm glad I acquired knowledge of it as a UK native - I would hate to learn its weird quirks as a 2nd, 3rd or whatever language as I'm sure if that had been the case my English skills would be even more dire than they are.
Back in the late 1980s I was at a big printing expo at the Birmingham NEC. There were some amazing quality colour printers, which were quite rare back then as dot matrix with a four colour ribbon was the best most people got to see, and also some newspaper production line printers. These were only run in full speed demonstration mode for very short periods and not very often. The output was such high volume that it had to be cleared off the stand within a couple of minutes, which is why the normal output collector had been replaced with a large wheely bin.
When I worked at IBM on OS/2 applications (this was 1990), my group had a corkboard with various cartoons on the wall.
This was during Gulf War 1.0, and one of the strips showed an senior Iraqi intelligence officer preparing to interrogate a captured fighter pilot who was shot down. The junior officers who interrogated him already said they couldn't get anything useful from him. He had obviously been well trained to withstand interrogation, and he responded to all questions with meaningless gibberish.
The senior interrogator says he'll probably be more successful.
In the next panel, the pilot is asked "what is your mission here?", and responds with "to inflict maximum lethality on enemy forces by a cohesive strategy that combines holistic bombardment with maximal aerial offensive services delivered by a cohesive alliance of aligned partners in such a way as to achieve regional satisfaction from all stakeholders", and the senior interrogator is yelling STOP, STOP!
Numerous comment cards on the corkboard pointed out that pilot's mission statement made more sense than many of the IBM ones currently being worked on.
See also "Good Omens", and Sergeant Deisenburger who was guarding the US air base is magically teleported home to his farm; as he strips off his gear he talks to his Mom:
Mom: Hello? My goodness! Tommy?
Deisenburger: It is indeed myself, mother.
Mom: Well, I thought you was in England.
Deisenburger: Well, yes, mom, I am normatively in England, mom, protecting democratism, mom, sir, but I just found myself here at home.
Mom: Well, that’s nice, hon. Your papa’s down in the big field with Chester and Ted. You want some apple pie for supper? It’s bakin’ day.
Deisenburger: That’s affirmative, Mom, sir.
Mom: That’s wonderful.
Deisenburger: Uh, mom, if any throughput eventuates premising to interface with Sergeant Thomas A. Deisenburger, telephonically, Mom, sir, this individual will be-
Mom: Tommy?
Deisenburger: Aw, heck. If anyone calls, I’ll be down in the big field with Pop and Chester and Ted.
One of the mental health benefits of retirement is that one may call bs when one hears corporate speak. When a medical person tells me they will "reach out" to me, I ask when I may anticipate their email...to let them know that I don't want to play telephone tag and I do want a record of the conversation. If they know better they have the opportunity to do better.
My doctor's practice has this down to a fine art.
They start by leaving an incomprehensible message (in German, of course) on the phone. They don't answer a call back. Their 'nobody here' message says they prefer email. They don't answer their email, either.
So I just rock up every three months for a blood test and a couple of days later for the results, and everything somehow works.
(currently doing an eight month five days a week intensive German course, but I expect the message to make no more sense at the end of it!)
That's some serious German! Good luck.
As someone who had to learn[0] German from scratch as an adult, I found that specific medical vocabulary isn't really taught on the course and you might have to do some research on the terms for specific conditions(s) that you live with. For example, you'll probably learn that Herz is heart, but not what the various valves are called.
[0] Well still learning, I just suck less than before
The odds are that many medical terms are actually pretty much the same in both languages, because they're actually Greek. Common and simple words like "heart" will differ, but anything your average butcher couldn't name or describe, after cutting it out of a pig, will almost certainly be a Greek word transliterated into the Roman alphabet; for example, you could make a fair guess at translating the German word "kardialer" into "cardiac", or "endometriose" into "endometriosis".
You may be right. The use of 'buzzwords' may indicate some sort of desire to appear competent in the same way that engineers have demonstrable competence through making things that work.
In his book 'Capital in the 21st Century', Thomas Piketty in effect accuses many economists of 'mathematics envy', in that they want the certainty and elegance of (pure) mathematics but fail to realise that only comes by abstracting from the real world and ignoring the annoying details of physical reality. Life is really too complicated for the mathematical sort of certainty they want.*. As Bertrand Russell said:
"Mathematics may be defined as the subject in which we never know what we are talking about, nor whether what we are saying is true."
Just ask an HR manager to explain the Gaussian or Normal distribution and how that applies to their promotions and rewards (pay) policies.
The fact is that people who use bullshit buzzwords want to appear to know what they are talking about, and avoid anyone asking difficult questions. As
*I have a PhD in mathematical logic.
In his book 'Capital in the 21st Century', Thomas Piketty in effect accuses many economists of 'mathematics envy', in that they want the certainty and elegance of (pure) mathematics but fail to realise that only comes by abstracting from the real world and ignoring the annoying details of physical reality.
That problem gets everywhere and makes applied mathematicians wince. So picking on one large problem, the ability to measure, or infer temperatures-
A thermodynamic system in a state of internal thermodynamic equilibrium has a spatially uniform temperature. Its intensive properties, other than temperature, may be driven to spatial inhomogeneity by an unchanging long-range force field imposed on it by its surroundings.
Especially when that thermodynamic equilibrium doesn't exist in the real world. So then lots of wafflebollocks gets used to try and baffle people into thinking temperature measurements are actually reliable, and meaningful.
If you sound or use phrases coming out like anything from https://www.bullshitgenerator.com/ you fell for the BS yourself.
I found one in Portuguese, even before AI existed. Try https://lerolero.bgnweb.com.br/ and it will generate endless amounts of bullshit for you. There is even a Bullshit Checker hahaha
Yeah, one of those "water is wet" things.
Although I note that this study might - just might - have been a fictional and entirely made up one, and meant to prove that everybody will indeed accept and promote studies that align with their prejudices (in this case, prejudices about the general ability level of corporate bullshit slingers) without taking too close a look at the details. Am I getting *too* cynical?
