Buzzwords

My friend Geoff, (not his real name), a Terminal Supervisor in the coal and rail business, recently poured out his frustrations to me on the managerial idiocy of the Corporation he works for. Actually, he does this all the time and I have suggested to him that it might be him rather than them. He has a certain sympathy for that view but doesn’t find it helpful in any way. His current objection was to the use of corporate buzzwords that move around like viruses. Geoff is acutely tuned to hypocrisy and doublespeak so he is a very bad candidate for a successful corporate career. At a recent meeting, the buzzword was “alignment”. The senior management felt that the problems the corporation was facing was a lack of  “alignment” of managerial motivation. This was the cause of the trains not getting the required volume of coal through. Now Geoff has been in the train business for more than 20 years and has a completely contrary view to the train problem, one that entails old and mismatched trains and a corporate policy that based on the insane views of managers who have never worked with trains. But the fact that the management is not aligned with operational reality is irrelevant to corporate survival. Geoff is very sensitive to this hypocrisy, remember.

I told him to get “aligned”. There’s no point fighting City Hall, so to speak, and this is what he is doing. His reality based stance has compromised his career prospects and I said if only he were “aligned” he’d be fine. Fuck the trains. Get in line with the seniors. He understood this but is powerless to change.

This brings me to another favourite: “synergy”. One of the best buzzwords of recent years. It is so overused that just saying it makes you look incompetent. It is tightly linked to “alignment” in many ways. Not exactly but for many situations, they can be interchangeable terms. The thing is though, that the importance of “synergy” becomes apparent when you don’t have any. I was put in charge of the organization of the James Australia Group, a cluster of around a dozen companies that bore no resemblance to each other. One of my tasks was to make them work in harmony to achieve a greater goal. In effect, to “synergize” them. None of these companies had the same ERP and none had a CRM. Nor did they have sales figures or data that was consistent. There was no way of knowing how they had performed or who was doing what and when. Each company had legacy systems and cultures that did not fit with any of the other companies. I won’t go into details about how we addressed that but let’s just say there was no synergy and it very much needed some and soon. The term “synergy” was used a lot at that time but everyone knew how important it was to have a bit of it. Rather than a buzzword, it was a mission.

A second favourite is “insight”. At one ADMA Forum it was used in every sentence. In the next Forum, using the word meant you were out of date. A good test for these terms is to think about the implications of not having it. What if you don’t have insight, you don’t have synergy and your staff are not aligned? What happens then? I’ll tell you what. You have the James Australia Group, that’s what.

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