What the bureaucratic bastards really mean

Browsing The Listener site in an idle moment Adam came across a recent Life column by Bill Ralston, under the title Telling It Like It Is, sub-titled with the headline for this post, Ralston began:-

Increasingly, Government departments and SOEs have adopted the management gobbledegook jargon of commercial business, rendering any discussion with them almost incomprehensible to laymen.

I thought it would be handy to give you a glossary of terms that may be useful if you have any business dealings with such organisations in the future.

He then provides a list, of which the following extract is just a limited sampler:-

24/7 Sweatshop approach to labour.

Benchmark A standard either impossible to attain or easily attained, depending on whether you get to set the benchmark.

Best practice The CEO’s way of doing things.

Big picture Implies there really is a strategy involved.

Moving forward Putting past stuff-ups behind you and concentrating on a mysterious future point at which everything miraculously comes right.

Blue sky An overly optimistic view, usually accompanied by the phrase “green fields”, denoting little or no chance of a screw-up, but inevitably ending in a dark day.

Take that offline As in “let’s take that offline”, which really means “shut the f— up, I’ll sort you out later”.

Now having worked in business for a long time, Adam would have to confess that Ralston has got many, if not all, of these right. Though, Adam inclines to the view that Government, and politicians, have perhaps embraced some of these approaches far too ardently and thus have become zealots with these as the central tenets of their beliefs.