Synergizing Synergistic Synergies
Anyone who knows me has likely come to first recognize, then rebuff, and finally accept my fascination with contemporary business-speak.
I spent two years editing documents for a high-tech firm, and will probably spend a few more, elsewhere now. In that time I’ve had vacuous corporate jargon flung at me from all angles: the suits, the workers, the lawyers, and even the building maintenance staff. I’ve felt the deepest synergy, yes I have. I’ve synced-up, kicked-off, and fleshed-out. I’ve been pinged again and again. I’ve leveraged things, I’ve evolved things. I’ve been a resource. When nobody was looking, I even…e-tailed.
To deploy a fine piece of glistening, amorphous hooey strung together by a master of one’s craft is to make a little miracle; to edit these same masters’ documents is to help them make sausage. In either case, I got my hands filthy. Our company’s sales staff was concerned primarily with the creation, dissemination, and refinement of deceit. It came easy to them, because it was taught from day one to the very end, in meeting rooms, conference calls, and even at the bar after work. The nature of “productization” or “going to market” meant hiding this feature behind that one, and talking up the positives whether they existed or not. It was a simple game: fill thirty pages. Repeat yourself if you must, but fill that length and not a word less. What software is worth buying that can’t be talked about for thirty pages?
“It’s done for a reason,” I was told. “We want the customer to be impressed by our products, even if they suck, and the only way to impress customers is to speak their language, and lots of it.”
It is true, of course. A piece of software will not sell with a one-line description, even if it only does one thing. The business world demands an acknowledgement of itself as its own customer in order for the dollars to flow. It wants to see its own meaningless verbiage spewed reflexively back upon itself before it has itself a customer. A gambit of inanity. That’s how value is made. That application may well be flexible, customizable, and powerful, or it may be only flexible, but that’s your problem now. It can do fifty transactions, a hundred transactions, who knows? Either way, you’ve got thirty pages to fill.
We had one manager in particular who was very nearly incapable of making meaning through language. “Fill thirty pages,” he must have been thinking, as he told us about how we’d “enact these changes on a going-forward basis”, or take part in “revenue-oriented activity.” His was a world where “leveraging resources” meant employees playing on the see-saw at the company picnic, and “processing a granular transaction” may well have meant sitting on the toilet to make caca.
(Was it wrong to have created a drinking game based on this particular manager? Anyway.)
Business-speak fascinates me because of its nebulous etymology (if there are any bus-speak historians out there, I would love to hear from you) and its evident commentary on our society at large. I’m interested in the merger between bureaucracy and culture, and its unobstructed creep into our everyday parlance. And it’s hip! Productivity’s all the rage! Are we far off from the Moleskine Gaant chart? Have you ever caught yourself on your cell phone on your way to the Fiery Furnaces show, asking a friend to “touch base” with you in a bit? Ever “utilized” a wire whisk to beat flour into eggs? Hell, I’m the most pretentious fucker in the world and I still touch a few bases here and there, and I don’t mean in the good way. Should we admit it to ourselves now while we can still be saved? Is it an artifact from a society that not only calls but perhaps views people as “resources”, little directionless rational ants scrambling to be put towards this task or that one?
I’m off to leverage sleep-based frameworks, but I want you to do your part. Come up with a few new terms, bounce ‘em off your boss, see what he or she thinks. Synergize with me here. Ping me with your status. Liase, do some procurement, get back to me when you’ve got the bandwidth. It’s just the nature of the reality of the situation, is all.
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(4 comments)
i noticed you’ve got crazy kats up, i assume youve seen pinky?
Indeed, Pinky has made the rounds, but it still kills me. Esp. the “sonofabitch…pardon my language” at the end.
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