The Weekly Meat

Understanding Work

Sure, there are nuances (yes, I actually understand the difference between things like "cash flow" and "run rate"), but essentially, here's how the continuing abuse of the English language breaks down at work.

 

What Work says	What Work means
acronym	initialism
agile	fewer employees
bleeding-edge technology	we don't actually understand this yet, but, apparently, other people do
bottom line	executive wealth
challenges	problems
collaborating with our customers	selling our products at a deep discount
do more with less	work more hours
disinvesting	laying off human beings
executing on our strategy	the stock is doing OK right now
issues	problems
leaving to pursue other opportunities	executive got shit-canned (harnessed snugly to golden parachute)
leaving to spend more time with his/her family	executive got shit-canned (harnessed snugly to golden parachute) and is either getting divorced or his/her spouse has Cancer
leveraging synergies	laying off human beings
non-GAAP earnings	this is the part where we've cooked the books
our core principles	shareholder wealth
please join me in welcoming our new team members	please train these people well, as they will soon be replacing your "job function"
rapid deployment	disorganized, bug-laden, non-functional
refer you to Investor Relations	they won't answer your question either
resources	human beings
reduction in force	layoffs
startup-like	working longer hours
strategic acquisition	we bought either a) a bankrupt company, b) our competition, or c) both
to be completely honest	I'm about to lie
top-line	sales
we are expanding to support our customers in certain geographies	we are outsourcing work to India and China
we have to convince The Street...	the stock is still in the shitter because no one seems to be buying our non-GAAP earnings numbers

 

Hope this helps!

Unfortunate Business Names

ANALTECH — Yes, really. They're "the logical choice thin-layer chromatography."

BIMBO Bakeries — Theoretically, it's supposed to be pronounced "beembo." Um, yeah, whatever. P.S. Now sponsoring the Philadelphia Union soccer team!

BJ's — Say I'm unnecessarily sexualizing this if you must, but I refuse to believe that the big box wholesale club is the first place folks go in their mind when they hear talk of "BJs."

BOLUS (Freight Systems) — 1. a rounded mass, as a) a large pill b) a soft mass of chewed food. 2. a dose of a substance (as a drug) that is administered intravenously. I often see their semis on the highway, and wonder each time why these people chose an obscure medical term (clearly not a family name) for their trucking business.

BONOBOS — Naming a men's clothing company after the notoriously-hypersexual chimpanzees might be a good idea. Something tells me not, but, uh, maybe that's what they're going for.

BUNGHOLE LIQUORS — Yes, I know what the technical definition of a bunghole is. But really?

DEATH WISH PIANO MOVERS — Tongue-in-cheek, obviously. If you're going to go all in with a name like this, you damn well better be the absolute best at what you do. Maybe they are, maybe they're not (I haven't had occasion to use them, despite their proximity), but they seem to be doing OK for the moment.

...as opposed to, say, TNT freight — I'm not even sure what the TNT actually stands for, but when one work vendor insisted on using them instead of FedEx or UPS, we used to refer to them (accurately, I should add) as "Tomorrow, Not Today."

FLUKE Corporation — OK, so Fluke is the founder's last name. But actually using said name is about as brilliant as former New Hampshire politician Dick Swett or former NASCAR driver Dick Trickle not opting for either "Rich" or "Rick" as a nickname.

MAINE OXY — Sadly, as it happens, Maine leads the nation – by far – in the percentage of residents being treated for addiction to painkillers. Like, you know, Oxy.

NOVARTIS — Fancy-pants, bajillion dollar, multinational pharmaceutical company, yes. But with a name that sounds as funny/awkwardly clinical as the 100+ year old mouthwash that coined the term "halitosis." Mmm...

ORIFICE RECYCLING & REFUSE — With their bright pink recycling carts, you can "roll breast cancer to the curb." OK, so their hearts are in the right place. But, well, their heads are up their business name.

PHARTRONICS Engineering — Find them in Oklahoma City! [Insert your own phart joke here.]

SCHWING America — This concrete pump manufacturer couldn't have known when they started up back in the mid-'70s that the phenomenon of Wayne's World would make them a household word/joke by the mid-'90s.

Which, of course, leads us to...

WANG Laboratories — They've been defunct for 15 years, but no list like this would be complete without mentioning the once-giant Wang.

Best worst-named company? The hands-down winner ...

SOFA KING — Sofa king good because it's sofa king funny.

The Mid-Life Crisis

I'm 42, and though it has been slow in developing, I believe I am now fully involved in the proverbial Mid-Life Crisis. It's not manifesting itself in the traditional guy ways of thinking that a faster car or a younger wife, or copious amounts of cocaine or Rogaine, is going to greatly improve my life as I begin to rage against going gentle into that good night. Those, frankly, are dick things. And it's not a dick thing for me. Rather — as work seems my addiction of choice these days — my struggle seems to be all about work.

There has been some mid-life flirtation with running, but the true crisis is about work. It has always been about work. 

Between my day job, the blog, and my artwork, I am now consumed 24/7 with work. And even liking it (despite the occasional grousing). Similar to an epiphany about academia back in college, I've discovered more recently that though it has taken some time, I've finally become quite good at work — even doing the stuff that used to drive me crazy, like the business end of being a working artist (making art is the easy part; showing and selling it is far more difficult).

Still, as I hit the second half of life (and if I do indeed live to be 84, I expect I might be completely satisfied), I wrestle with the question of whether what I'm doing now is what I really want to be doing. The right step for me career-wise? What I could conceiveably do for another 25–30 years? And if not, shouldn't I shit or get off the pot?

There are occasions that try our souls, and the mid-life crisis is indeed one of them.

Sometimes I don't know exactly what I think until I write about it, and this is one of those times. Particularly, when one writes an essay, one needs to put forth a thesis, a sustainable argument. That is essentially, the mission of this blog, for good or ill and whether or not I succeed.

So here we are. And what, pray, is my thesis?

Can't say. But I can tell you that the mid-life crisis seems a hell of a lot easier proposition when one has real money behind them. Or no kids. Or no relationship. Kind of tough to chuck it all though when there is a mortgage to pay, mouths to feed, a future to make. Or maybe that's just me using my family as human shields to mask my fear of serious change (remember Inertia?).

So much to think on — while one sits, figuratively, on the pot.

Me and Work

Hey Work, you win. You won two weeks back, and you sure as hell won again last week.

I'm tired of these 10- and 12-hour days; tired of being tied to you and that damned laptop; tired, still, from the red-eye back from California last week followed immediately by more 10- and 12-hour days.

I'll admit, I thrive on the adversity, the adrenaline. I like the challenge. And I'm not a guy who's able to accept doing a job shittily, so I need to do well.

But now you're inhabiting my sleep and stealing time from my family. So enough with the semi-annual layoffs, the "doing more with less," the "becoming more agile and startup-like" while at the same time offshoring and globalizing.

I like the yearly trip to Israel, I do. But those folks are seven hours ahead of us, and so I regularly put in early mornings to catch up with them. And India, well, they're 10-1/2 hours ahead. And then California, of course, three hours behind. So my day no longer spans eight hours; rather, sometimes 16.

Because the sun never sets on you, Work.

And the Israelis are smart too. And the Indians are well-trained, hungry, and willing. And the Serbians—god bless them, in Belgrade, with all those consonants we rarely use—a few of them are even more on the ball than the Indians and Israelis. In fact I'm not so confident anymore that the US is still able to lead this global economy.

But I'll save that for another post.

This is meant to be more about things like drowning in email. An answer to a simple question can generate two dozen emails from three or four continents. And all those words need to be read. And responded to. And deleted. Or archived. And the time and energy involved in a simple question-and-answer gets multiplied exponentially in a way that, say, walking down the hall to talk to a colleague does not.

So enough with the goddamn British Empire approach. (You know, in the long run, it didn't exactly work for them.)

Yes, I could find another job—and admittedly, Ive been prepping my LinkedIn profile for a healthy spin around the alternatives—and yes, there are plenty of folks who'd love to replace me, but I am damn good at what I do, I still have more to prove here, and would hate to leave before I'm quite finished. Before you'd really miss me. Because, more than anything, at any job, I am driven by an internal need to make myself indispensable.

Go ahead, psychoanalyze that last bit. It's OK. I'm not a punk kid anymore. I've done it myself, paid good money to have it done for me, and you won't tell me anything I don't already know.

Besides, this thing is between you and me, Work.

So yeah, you won last week, and you won the week before that too.

This week though? This week... Your. Ass. Is. Mine.

Four-Letter Word

I pride myself on bringing the weekly meat like Sam the butcher, but lately, work is kicking my ass like I'm Chuck Wepner (at least I've got my health...), and I need a flier this week.

Please accept my apologies with a side of hard-working inspiration, courtesy of mister James Brown, and come on back next week for more tasty vittles.

Corporate Doublespeak

Note: This piece was originally published in The Boston Globe, in slightly different form.

 

There is a virus rampant in the business world that has slowly infected our lives outside of the office. It's not an e-mail worm this time. It's not a Microsoft bug. It's not spam. It's the babble we all use in our attempts to communicate with each other.

Or, to put it in a language we all think we understand: In our rush to ramp up our skill sets and partner with new media companies for value-added, win-win business solutions that leverage our knowledge base to maximize customer take-away, we've forgotten how to explain ourselves clearly and concisely.

In his great essay "Politics and the English Language," George Orwell argues convincingly that sloppy language allows us to have foolish thoughts. And we use sloppy language and have foolish thoughts now more than ever in the business world. Further, we propagate both.

The fact is, we have come to accept the obscure muddle of business-speak, and in doing so, we accept mediocrity itself. I'm not talking about poor spelling and grammar — though they're certainly not beside the point — I'm talking about our favorite adjective-turned-noun: content.

The folks in Marketing like to call it verbiage — that is, when they're not mispronouncing it "verbage." Ironically, verbiage is the perfect description of what too many of us are guilty of in the workplace. It doesn't simply mean "content," as most assume; it means "a profusion of words usually of little or obscure content." Yes, we do love our verbiage. We use pre-fab word bundles where one word will do. We say job function instead of "job," or top-line growth instead of "sales."

As George Carlin said, ''People add extra words when they want to sound more important than they really are.''

Words or phrases become clichéd through their use and misuse. But many of the buzzwords we use every day mean little to begin with. One well-respected new media company has since become more exacting, but in an earlier published incarnation of their mission statement,  billed themselves as a ''digital solutions provider that helps organizations generate competitive value by leveraging the power of technology.'' Sure, it sounds good, but what is it such a company does?

This corporate doublespeak turns adjectives into nouns, nouns into verbs, verbs into nouns, and humans into resources — all of which slowly converts our workplace into the cartoon world of Dilbert, and fills business meetings with the sweet nothings of executing on our strategy and bringing critical mass to our efforts. But the yes-men create value by yes-ing, and generally keep their jobs by simply regurgitating whatever text fills the latest PowerPoint slides, and the cycle repeats itself.

Much of our failure to communicate is the fault of consulting groups, who feed us their own rich sub-genre of euphemisms such as sub-optimal and developmental opportunities to downplay corporate inadequacies. Coworkers are never laid off; they are affected by a reduction in force, as a result of global sourcing (read: sending American jobs to India, China, etc.) or synergies (read: redundancies) due to acquisitions. Not to worry — layoffs help us become more agile in the marketplace.

My argument is bigger than semantic nitpicking. I taught college lit long enough to know that Orwell's 1984 illustrates the fact that for great ideas to exist, we need precise language with which to express those ideas. And too many know-nothing managers and VPs have yes-ed themselves into positions as the overmatched CEOs of today. Part of the reason many companies are tanking is that so many foolish thinkers hold positions of power. While high economic times allow poor management to hide behind the smokescreen of verbiage, difficult times do not.

Case in point: George W. Bush — our first MBA president. Face it, he had some of the best consultants and spin-meisters in the world working for him, and his well-spun jargon on the heels of the dot-com boom made him sound credible to nearly half of American voters back in the fall of 2000. Needless to say, those same folks eventually began to wonder when we were going to see any of the purported "compassion" in Bush's conservatism, and whether we would ever find enough palpable "evil" in Iraq to outweigh the continuing loss of American lives.

This is not to single out President Bush — though he deserves it — as there are plenty of politicos on both sides of the aisle who play fast and loose with the English language that we would all be well-advised to mind the flashy but nonsensical sound bites this election season. Unexamined, they will only serve to reward and further mediocrity — and what a waste, in a country founded on revolutionary thinking and the clarity of a few strongly worded documents.

We should not feel so threatened by such concise language, at work and at home, nor by novel ideas, by smart people. We need to hold accountable our managers, our VPs, our CEOs, when they start tossing around rhetorical cotton candy. I'm sure they have more to offer than they're currently able to express.

For that matter, we could all be a bit smarter and more creative, and certainly more intelligible, if we were not so apathetically liaising with our colleagues and having, as Mr. Bush the younger might say, important discussions about topics in regard to which we're speaking.

But not to worry: a consultant friend of mine assures me that though our situation may appear sub-optimal, ultimately, it presents us all with tremendous developmental opportunities.

So we've got that going for us....

How to Get Ahead in Business

Introduction
Open with a joke followed by a mixed sports metaphor. If you can do both at the same time, you'll be batting a thousand right out of the gate!

(Note: Exclamation points are generally for admins and the folks in MarCom. But what the heck, break the rules occasionally!)

PowerPoint
Always use PowerPoint. It's the greatest tool of all time for prolonging a meeting. And nothing is more business-y than a good long self-important meeting. PowerPoint enables you to project your notes onto a big screen so you can then read them verbatim to attendees. It allows you to waste time, money, and create 1970s-style "fly-in" animation at the same time you're wasting time and money. (How's that for synergy!?) So do it. Baffle them with bullshit. Above all, remember, nothing generates buzz like buzzwords.

Buzzwords
Repeat whichever buzzwords and acronyms you've heard in the latest meeting, especially from those one to two levels above you. When possible, try to be wordy (remember: four words good, two words bad) without actually being substantive. In lieu of content, use clichés, big words, and jargon. If you don't know any jargon, make up an acronym.

Acronyms
Everyone loves acronyms. From CEOs to CIOs and CMOs, all the way down the line to VPs. Also, there are some terrific jargon-generators out here if you know where to look. When you are forced to be substantive, be obtuse, and tell folks what they already know. People love re-learning what they already know. It makes them feel smart.

Bullet Lists
At around this point in any newsletter article or presentation, you'll want to include some bullet points:

• People love bullets
• They're like headlines
• That call attention to themselves
• So non-bulleted text can be ignored

There's No "i" in Team
Agree with your boss. They like that. And when your boss asks you to do something, turn around and assign the task to your subordinates. It'll make them feel special, and show your boss what a good designator you are. Designator is a new word. It's like decider.

Troubleshooting
If you're ever asked a question that requires actual thought, have a mental list of go-to words that you feel comfortable with: strategy, function, and execute are great ones to start with. You'll want words that are pretty much interchangeable and can be used to mean anything in any situation. Use them as needed. (Note: They can be especially effective in conjunction with one another.)

Conclusion
So get out there in 2008 and be all you can be — drive the car you aspire to be able to afford. Remember, everyone loves you — especially your boss's assistant. (You could run this whole shebang if you had an assistant like that.) So ramp up your game a notch, execute on strategy, and generate competitive value by leveraging technology to maximize customer take-away.

That said, I'd hate to leave you without an invaluable take-away. So here it is — the PowerPoint presentation....

| View | Upload your own

Corporate Grass Roots

Two years ago, a co-worker brought me a draft of a letter to the Senior VPs of the large corporation for which we work in the cubicled salt mines. The letter was a plea for the cause of energy conservation within the company. We’re a multinational Silicon Valley software company of roughly 5,000; surely, we could be doing something — anything — to green up.

We cranked out a final copy of the letter and began asking colleagues to co-sign with us. It felt somewhat revolutionary (Sure, we work for The Man, and sure, he checks our email and peeks in our web browsing, but we're free-thinking individuals, dammit, not mindless proles...); we were earnest and enthusiastic and ready to take on the big guns with our well-honed rhetoric.

Thankfully, before we dashed off the letter to corporate, the local facilities manager — a seasoned DC lobbyist, and all for our cause — asked us to reconsider our actions. Somewhat chastened at first, we did, and instead wisely decided to form a small task force to see what we could do locally, with the long-range plan of using our presumed success as a proof of concept to sell the conservation argument up the ladder to corporate.

Even as I get older and  — ahem — more respectable, it bores me to do things slowly and methodically, but ultimately, we made the right choice. Sure, I'd love to see change happen through punk rock, bold art, and strong words, but change doesn't happen overnight, and no one likes to be shown up — especially those with initials in their job titles — and the letter, signed by 50 employees might have seemed a bit mutinous to our paycheck-endorsers. Sometimes, it’s simply not necessary to fight corporate city hall loudly, as morally empowering as it might feel at the time. In fact, if we had, we might have more easily forgotten our cause after getting a lip service response. Instead, we now have a hugely successful locally-grown initiative that is indeed the model of conservation we’d hoped for.

Thanks to buy-in from the site manager, and local facilities, IT, and business unit group heads, as well as excellent employee support, the initiative within months reached our initial goal of reducing the amount of electricity our site uses by 100,000 kilowatt hours (kW h), annualized, and we have since saved another 50,000 kW h per year.

At our site of approximately 300 employees, computers outnumber people nearly five to one, so clearly there was some (as the suits like to say) “low-hanging fruit” to be had. Thus, our biggest gains have been made not by changing expensive building systems like HV/AC, but by improving inefficiencies in our computing operations. We’ve given away unused equipment, shut down rarely-used equipment, set machines to power-savings mode, and asked fellow employees to forgo power-draining "screen savers" (that’s right, kids, it takes a lot of CPU power to draw those pretty multicolor 3D pipe designs and such) in favor of turning off their monitors when they leave for the night. Electricity rates vary, so cost savings are somewhat tough to estimate (certainly over $20,000 per year though), but in terms of usage, our simple housekeeping measures have so far conserved enough energy to power 18 average New England homes, yearly.

What’s more, we haven’t spent any corporate funds to achieve our substantial savings. We even convinced our vending machine contractor to install on our soda machines energy miser sensors, which power up a machine only when they detect motion (i.e., a customer), while maintaining beverage temperature as necessary.

In addition, we’ve greatly changed the way that we use the computing power we do have — not only centralizing data storage on robust servers, but sharing their processing power as well. We then access those servers not with power-hungry tower-style computers, but with laptops which, on the average, use one-quarter the power of most bigger, desktop CPUs.

We’ve continued to maintain, not increase, our energy usage, and to share information with other sites and encourage them to set up similar local initiatives, and have slowly — and successfully — been pushing energy awareness and savings up the chain of command. We’ve even been cited positively by corporate executive staff, when asked what we as a company are doing to green up.

Not bad for a few local folks with a chip on their collective shoulder and a hopeful eye toward change. Our grass-roots solution demanded that we change first — not simply talk the talk of revolution — and it ultimately proved far more effective than our initial demand for that same change in corporate. Our well-written and thoughtful letter to corporate would have been, essentially, an op-ed piece without a newspaper to print it and only a very small audience to read it.

The tendency in most large corporations is toward apathy and wastefulness, but it needn’t be. Sure, we’re all more thrifty at home than at work, but what a simple thing it is to turn off the lights when you're done in the copy room, or to police up computers left on in empty cubes. It’s no skin off my nose, and though I’d rather see executive pay come back in line with say, reality, wastefulness breeds more wastefulness, and it’d be nice if the suits had fewer excuses when it’s time for raises to be handed down to those of us toiling in the mines.