A Corporate Jargon Buster

A CORPORATE JARGON-BUSTER

A 2-Pager by Ajit Chaudhuri – July 2015

 

I did two things last year – I joined the corporate sector, and I shifted to Mumbai. Both were pretty big deals! I had never done time in the corporate sector and didn’t even know anyone from there. And as for Mumbai, like most Delhi-wallahs I used to find the city dirty, smelly and intimidating and avoided it to the extent possible.

It’s been OK (so far), and I have been surprised! The corporate sector has not turned out to be overflowing with alpha scumbags pushing and shoving their way to the C-suite, and it has been somewhat comforting to realize that meetings here are as long and unproductive as they were in NGOs and that my skills in being fast asleep or scoring goals in the football world cup and cavorting with supermodels while looking attentive and engaged in the discussion are as much required now as they were earlier. And as for the city, I am slowly discovering that there is more to it than Shiv Sainiks and train commuters; that amidst the high-rises are some beautiful old buildings, that its pavements are walkable and its traffic is chaotic but unaggressive, and that it has its eccentricities (for example, its famous insularity applies as much within as it does outside – for the Colaba-walla, the act of crossing Peddar Road is undertaken with the same reluctance that you and I would go to Bihar, and others use the word ‘sobo’, not particularly politely, to describe the South Mumbaikar).

Anyway – to the purpose of this note! I have noticed that I am not the first migrant from academia, development and consulting to move to the corporate sector, and I will not be the last – there are opportunities here and the salaries are good. Those of you looking to move here will need to adjust to the peculiarities of the sector; the hierarchical mode of functioning, the humungous quantum of email to be dealt with, the working lunch, et al. And one of these is the language of corporate-speak.

This note looks to identify terms and phrases that are ubiquitous here but not heard (by me) elsewhere, and thereby prepare wannabe or recent migrants for linguistic survival. It describes a selected ten from a long list detailed in the table below.

 

The Long List

30,000 feet	Asset light model	Back of the envelope	Bandwidth	Blue sky
Capex	Closing the loop	Curate	Custodian	CXO, C-suite
Dashboard	Deck	Deep dive	Granular	Hardstop
Long list	Messaging Corridor	Non value added activity	Optics	Pitchbook
Playbook	Pushback	Quick wins	SOP	Speaking above one’s pay grade
SPOC	Stretch target	Traction	Vertical	White space

 

 

 

A Short Description of a Select Few

30,000 feet: A higher level view or perspective of a situation, seeing its larger picture and its strategic linkages rather than its details.

Bandwidth: You can’t say ‘piss off, I’m busy’ to someone who is giving you work that you can’t or don’t want to do, you say ‘I have limited bandwidth at the moment’.

Deep dive: The move from 30,000 feet to the details is a deep dive.

Granular: Your lazy minions need to get back to work and put in some rigour and detail into their presentation – you say ‘would you like to bring in some granularity?’

Hard stop: A meeting is meandering on and Real Madrid is going to play FC Barcelona in 30 minutes – you get collective agreement on a hard stop in 15.

Non value added activity: Bumming around the coffee machine, discussing last night’s match, sharing info on the shopping in the vicinity of the office and gossiping about a colleague’s wandering eye, all the useless stuff that makes life in the rabbit warren of junior management bearable, actually constitutes non value added activity.

Pushback: When the company has acquired land from tribal communities for mining or whatever against their will, and there has been an armed insurgency against this in which your executives have been kidnapped and their testicles chopped off, you don’t say ‘Boss, we are in deep shit’ to your reporting officer. You say ‘Sir, there is some pushback from the locals’.

Speaking above one’s pay-grade: This refers to a gaffe that those of us not used to hierarchical structures tend to commit in our early and stupid days in the corporate sector, when we are falsely confident of our own expertise and the openness of higher echelons within the organization to our opinions. We soon figure out that it is hara-kiri to ‘speak above one’s pay grade’.

SPOC: Not from Star Trek but an acronym for Single Point of Contact – when you are taking forward an activity that cuts across departments or divisions, you need a SPOC from each else you will be knee-deep in non-value added activity handling the coordination, for which you are unlikely to have sufficient bandwidth.

White space: I have yet to find an acceptable way to say ‘this is pure and unadulterated bullshit’ in office, or that a ‘monumental f**k up’ has happened, and this constitutes a white space in corporate jargon. Any suggestions?