Sunday 20 May 2012

It's all corporate Greek to me

As I prepare to re-enter corporate land for the next few months I may need to get my brain back in the zone. I’ve managed to avoid brain melt (AKA daytime TV) as a freelancer/lady of leisure, but I am wondering if my grey matter is in for a shock when I have to do a ‘normal’ job again and (god help me) translate the business speak.
I anticipate next week will be awash with dove-tailing, leveraging and piggy-backing, and I wonder what new gems will have been created since I last rubbed shoulders with the suits. As I transition back into the office life I better take ownership of my core competencies and make sure my skillset is primed to on-board my key stakeholders and get their buy-in. Ouf! There I was thinking I was terrible at languages when apparently I speak fluent corporate twaddle.
Who needs plain English when you can touch base rather then meet, have dialogue rather than talk and operationalise rather than just feckin’ do it? Not to mention the Mystic Meg style future-proofing that goes on - impressive. Maybe talking gibberish and making up words means you’re less likely to get pushback from the gatekeepers (methinks a dungeons and dragons fan came up with that one…)
And then there are the TLAs. Which, my friends, are Three Letter Acronyms. Yes - an acronym for an acronym. I must prepare myself for cryptic sentences like; ‘I can give you an ETA if they fix my VPN within their SLA – should be by COP.’ Close of Play. One of my favourites …appears to suggest a day of fun? (maybe it's all the piggy-backing?)
There’s only one thing for it – make up some nonsense of my own. They do say If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em, so I shall have to apply some blue-sky thinking and dream up a ridiculous addition to the office dictionary. Maybe I can multi-task and have a thought shower whilst I take a comfort break (or maybe not – taking a comfort break in the shower is most unsanitary). I will, of course, run it up the flagpole and socialise the idea first thought, god forbid I should re-invent the wheel!

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