Will they beat the drum slowly?
I have spent far more time of late than is good for my nerves quality assuring - from a diversity point of view - vast numbers of "management training products" which are shortly to be unleashed on every manager in the organisation for which I work.
Rarely have I had so much cause to be grateful for the fact that, despite being of a managerial grade myself, it is some years since I have been blessed with staff.
I gather that what I have always known as "classroom training" is now called "a face-to-face intervention".
I am considering holding a wake for my beloved and beautiful mother tongue.
Rarely have I had so much cause to be grateful for the fact that, despite being of a managerial grade myself, it is some years since I have been blessed with staff.
I gather that what I have always known as "classroom training" is now called "a face-to-face intervention".
I am considering holding a wake for my beloved and beautiful mother tongue.
The Editor
posted by
Lady Bracknell | Tuesday, October 16, 2007
6 Comments:
Sadly, in my job I come across a lot of meaningless Newspeak. Training sessions are now 'face-to-face interaction in the educational domain'.
I have sat through entire Powerpoint presentations of such rubbbish where no actual useful information is imparted.
I can't bear it.
The "Setting the Scene" (core-; intermediate-; and strategic-level) "products" are so densely-populated with management-speak jargon that I defy anyone to work out what their author actually intended them to convey.
Despite the fact that my remit is solely to comment on diversity issues, I couldn't hold myself back from pointing out that "curricular" is not a noun.
Good for you Lady B.! I too despair of the casual abuse of our mother tongue. I know that languages have to evolve, but surely management's job used to be to manage people? Not to sit through interminable meetings without a hint of English being spoken?
I think so-called 'authors' of such works actually just pick phrases at random out of someone else's latest offering. It's the same with my youngest's educational establishment. Some of the stuff she brings home is illiterate - hardly what you'd expect from such a place!
Luckily Powerpoint presentations were not available to my peers, so unlike the esteemed Dame, I've never had to endure one. There are some consolations to getting older after all!
Angie xx
A new English word entered the German management jargon: commitment and Germanized derivations of it.
"Wir brauchen ihr commitment für diese Sache" (we would like you to commit yourself to...) is quite a common phrase nowadays.
I hate Powerpoint presentations. Until they have come into being interpreters were given proper scripts for preparation. We now usually get PPPresentations. I have been sitting over so many Presentations desperatly trying to find out what the person is going to speak about, with little or no result at all.
Oh dear, oh dear.
It is desperate. I feel like throughing in the towel (or should that be the 'manual self drying apparatus'.)
I am, of course, immensely sympathetic about the sad fact that you, as a manager, have all this horror yet to come... ;-)
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