Management Speak

Steven Poole has hit a nerve with his article in the Guardian on 10 of the worst examples of management speak. It’s got over 1,800 comments all of them expressing their loathing of management speak.

It reminds me of the old joke, which I came across at least ten years ago, of the Accenture consultant’s answer to the question of why did the chicken cross the road. It was a perfect echo of the language that was being used at my place of work:

“Deregulation of the chicken’s side of the road was threatening its dominant market position. The chicken was faced with significant challenges to create and develop the competencies required for the newly competitive market. Accenture, in a partnering relationship with the client, helped the chicken by rethinking its physical distribution strategy and implementation processes. Using the Poultry Integration Model (PIM) Accenture helped the chicken use its skills, methodologies, knowledge capital and experiences to align the chicken’s people, processes and technology in support of its overall strategy within a Program Management framework. Accenture convened a diverse cross-spectrum of road analysts and best chickens along with Accenture consultants with deep skills in the transportation industry to engage in a two-day itinerary of meetings in order to leverage their personal knowledge capital, both tacit and explicit, and to enable them to synergize with each other in order to achieve the implicit goals of delivering and successfully architecting and implementing an enterprise-wide value framework across the continuum of poultry cross-median processes. The meeting was held in a park like setting enabling and creating an impactful environment which was strategically based, industry-focused, and built upon a consistent, clear, and unified market message and aligned with the chicken’s mission, vision, and core values. This was conducive towards the creation of a total business integration solution. Accenture helped the chicken change to become more successful.”