Professionals of all kinds like to invent jargon and terminology to make simple things appear more complicated. It probably helps them validate their careers a bit more. Management, of course, is one of the key culprits. Here are some ‘gems’ – my favourite examples of giving special names to trivialities.

‘Buy-in’

Yes, why stop at a rational, unbiased explanation when you can persuade people to ‘buy-in’ to your pointless suggestions: “We must get the producers to buy-into our dancing tadpole idea”. If someone asks you to get someone to buy-into something, it usually entails making up some crap to make everything sound wonderful.

‘Stakeholder Management’

A stakeholder is anybody that has an interest in whatever you are doing. In business, this usually means the people who are funding something. Managers actually devote a lot of time to ‘Stakeholder Management’, because they obviously want to convince the stakeholders that they are worth the obscene amounts of money they seem to be demanding.

‘Adding value’

Managers love to tell people to add value to work to make it better. Unfortunately, they use this term because they have no idea themselves as to what can specifically be done to improve something.

‘Meetings’

Not strictly a term, but a joke nonetheless. Meetings are usually an excuse to go to sleep, talk about nonsense, suck-up to your boss or all of the above.

‘Executive Summary’

This is something at the beginning of the document that tells you what the whole of the rest of the document is about. It’s like showing a paragraph describing the entire plot of a film just before the film starts. It is actually just a summary – the word ‘executive’ is merely there to remind us that the summary is for the high-ups who are too lazy to read anything over 5 sentences.

‘Ping’

Apparently, asking you to ‘send’ an email is not enough these days – you have to ‘ping’ one instead.

‘Finite amount of detail’

Okay, I just don’t get this one at all. If managers talk about things going into a finite amount of detail, they actually mean a lot of detail. This is where I get lost – finite means something that ends. Hence a finite amount of detail should mean that something goes into a limited amount of detail i.e not very much. But hey, who says managers have to be logical and rational?

‘Managing Expectations’

Make sure that everybody knows you’re gonna come up with some crap before you actually do it.

‘Piece’

As far as I can understand this can mean anything. A piece of physical work, a random piece of chit-chat, a piece of crap – whatever.

‘Action’

To ‘do’ something: “Can you take that up as an action, Bob?” It’s a good way of making something sound like it requires a lot of work, even when it doesn’t.

‘Own’

Apparently you can own something that doesn’t exist. Best combined with ‘action’ and piece’…

“Hey Bob, I’d like you to take that piece you were doing on the weather forward and own it. I also want you to own the actions that came out of yesterday’s meeting”

In plain English, this would probably sound something like: “Oi Bob, keep sending us the weather forecast, and make up a few tasks to do vaguely related to the 3 hour chit-chat we had yesterday so that it seems like we actually did something other than provide Starbucks with yet more money.”

Gotta love jargon.