"It used to be considered a bad thing when a person's words had little or no correspondence to reality. People called it 'lying,' and there was a commandment against it. Now it is taken to be the necessary prerequisite for advancement in America's increasingly bureaucratized political and corporate culture....
"they use the language of teamwork, personal empowerment, and consensus building, but then demonstrate by their autocratic, demeaning, and abusive behavior that they haven't the slightest idea what any of this verbiage means in actual practice. They speak as though they existed to empower their workers, then act as though their workers existed to empower them....
"'Transparency' means that some putative consultation took place that adhered to jargon-laden procedures that were understood by no one, not that deliberations are public and open to rational scrutiny, let alone that feedback is taken seriously; 'inclusion' means including those who already agree while excluding those who might make trouble; 'data-driven' means that supposed facts and anecdotes are found to justify decisions, not that decisions follow a thorough consideration of all available evidence. In short, the transparent is opaque, the inclusive is exclusionary, and to be driven by data is to be driven by ideology, with pseudo-evidence compiled in support after the fact.
"It's all backwards. In such cases, words no longer refer to real things and, maybe more importantly, they try to manipulate an audience.
"Workers come to understand before long that 'best practices' are just practices — something someone else has done that someone in management in need of some 'new' initiative needed to justify his or her large salary has decided to copy....
"There are, in fact, entire websites devoted to unveiling the real meanings behind the "doublespeak" that infects corporate America. Here are several well-known examples.
"Management Speak: The upcoming reductions will benefit the vast majority of employees.
Translation: The upcoming reductions will benefit me.
"Management Speak: Our business is going through a paradigm shift.
Translation: We have no idea what we've been doing, but in the future we shall do something completely different.
"Management Speak: There are larger issues at stake.
Translation: I've made up my mind so don't bother me with the facts.
"Management speak: We need to take it to the next level
Translation: In theory this means to make something better. In practice, it means nothing, mainly because nobody knows what the next level actually looks like and thus whether or not they've reached it.
"Management Speak: We are looking for 'buy-in.'
Translation: I have an idea. I didn't involve you because I didn't value you enough to discuss it with you. I want you to embrace it as if you were in on it from the beginning, because that would make me look like a great consensus builder.
"Management speak: We're going through a re-org.
Translation: No one knows what the heck is going on at the moment....
"it still seems important for various reasons to make it seem as if key decisions about the institution are being made by the faculty when clearly they are not....we have now the creation and maintenance of what we might call 'the Potemkin university,' institutions crafted to make it look as though there was a real college behind the façade, while increasingly, there is not. Such, I fear, is increasingly the status of our ostensibly "democratic" political institutions and much corporate governance....
"It brings to mind an old saying: 'Sincerity: Once you can fake that, you've got it made.'
"A century of management fads has created workplaces (including universities, but they are hardly alone in this) full of empty words and equally empty rituals. People use management-speak to give the impression of expertise. The inherent vagueness of the language helps people in authority dodge tough questions and any testing of their words against reality. Today, bureaucracy comes cloaked in the language of change. Organizations are full of people whose job is to use words to create change for no real reason, to no clear end (other than to preserve their managerial position) or create the illusion of change.
"Rarely do organizations in trouble admit they have suffered from 'mission creep,' come to terms with past mistakes, and decide to re-dedicate themselves to their founding vision to do with excellence what the institution was founded to do. Instead they usually try a series of management "fixes" (let's move some offices around, shift authority from manger x to manager y, and outsource job z) and then come up with some 'bold, new initiatives,' no more likely to succeed than the last five 'new' initiatives....
"With the failure of every new initiative and the termination of dedicated employees, the damage not seen and largely not accounted for, because it will not show up on the excel spread sheets, is the loss of a coherent organizational structure and culture along with the sense of purpose, collegiality, and morale that are its most important by-products. The marketplace can be rough and unforgiving, but often it is internal confusion, chaos, and lack of morale that will spell an institution's doom.
"All of this would be bad enough. But the lies! The empty verbiage. The endless streams of nonsense as though something real was in the works....
"Our institutions both public and private will not work well and do the service they must for the common good until we can speak honestly with one another and be clear about our mistakes. The ever-effervescent lingo of 'management speak' is no more honest than the propaganda of a totalitarian regime. It is designed to gloss over and induce forgetfulness about past mistakes and to create a Jedi mind trick that says about terminated employees: 'These are not the workers you were supposed to be looking out for.'"
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