This 20-term installment completes the undergraduate Biz-Speak series that began with BS 101 in July/August issue of PaperAge. BS 201 was published in January/February 2003, and BS 301 appeared in June 2003 issue. These previous installments can be found on www.paperage.com
Altogether, the series contains 80 Biz-speak terms, which with a little study can make you an instant BS hit at any business meeting or in Internet chat rooms and instant messenger sessions. Biz-speak can also juice-up email and add spice to your professional letters and memos as well as holiday, birthday, and other special event cards.
Most important, mastery of these terms can help you better understand what management consultants, strategy advisors, speakers at TAPPI and PIMA conferences, or maybe just your boss or co-workers are really saying around the lounge coffee pot or candy machine. For a while, until you are fully proficient, you might want to carry copies of all four installments in you back pocket for quick reference.
In this regard, we are considering publishing a pocket-sized BS Dictionary and possibly even bestowing BS diplomas on those who have truly mastered the art. Depending on reader interest, we might also continue the series into the graduate levels. Imagine being the envy of your professional neighborhood as a Master or Doctor of BS
Please let us know your interest, and continue to send BS terminology to kpatrick@paperage.com.
Adminisphere: Rarefied organizational layers beginning just above the rank and file. Decisions that fall from the adminisphere are often profoundly inappropriate or irrelevant
to the problems they were designed to solve.
Seagull: Someone from the Adminisphere who flies in, makes a lot of noise, craps on everything, then leaves.
Lead Dog: Non-empowered head person to blame when problems arise. Not the same as Top Dog, who typically resides in the Adminisphere and is immune to blame. Syn: a patsy
Benchmark: An objective assessment of how bad something really is so that further deterioration can be more accurately measured and blame properly placed.
Nail Jello to the Wall: An analogous BS reference to the difficulty of handling certain situations or jobs, such as morale boosting programs, improved housekeeping projects, losing weight, improving the company's bottom line, etc.
Enronitis: An infectious corporate malady striking upper levels of a company's adminisphere, characterized by uncontrolled urges to alter financial records, lie, cheat, etc.
Ohnosecond: That fraction of a second in which you realize you have just made a BIG mistake.
Empower: To give someone responsibility without authority, support, or related compensation. Lead Dogs are typically empowered by the Adminisphere. Syn. set-up.
Blamestorming: A session during which a group sits around discussing why a problem occurred, a project failed, a deadline was missed, etc., and whose fault it was
At the End of the Day: Biz-speak hip for "in the end," "when all is said and done," all-in-all," "it doesn't make a dime's worth of difference," "the proof's in the pudding," "it all comes out in the wash," etc., without sounding like Andy Griffith or Ward Cleaver.
Salmon Day: Generically similar to bad hair day, but more specifically a bad ego day involving the experience of spending an entire day swimming upstream only to get screwed and die in the end.
Reduction in Force (RIF): Lay offs, firings, blood lettings, dumpings, roundups, head rollings, guillotine parties, etc. A sport popularized by the paper industry in the late 1990s and early 2000s and abandoned when there was no longer a force to reduce.
SITCOMs: Single Income, Two Children, Oppressive Mortgage. What yuppies turn into when they have children and one of them stops working to stay home with the kids.
Economies of Scale: Bigger is better. Ungrasped or misunderstood by builders of mini-mills in the 1980s.
Proactive Solution: Biz-speak for taking the initiative in solving a problem, rather than reacting to it, which is like filling a hole before it is dug or bleaching pulp before it needs to be made whiter.
Bandwidth: Ripped off from the e-world, which ripped it off from ham radio operators. Has no specific application or meaning in the paper industry except to enhance BS'manship, e.g., "we need to boost maintenance bandwdith."
Game Plan: Another rip-off from the sports world. Used extensively by BS'ers to make an otherwise boring assignment sound like fun, e.g., "we have a great game plan for cleaning up liquor spills."
Value Proposition: A proposal to make something value-added, but with that term's same idiomatic dilemma, i.e., it has no opposing terminology such as Non-value proposition or valueless proposition. "Gentlemen, I have a valueless proposition to make that I know you will be excited about."
Assmosis: The process of absorbing success by kissing up to the boss rather than working hard.
WOOFYs: Well off old folks. Generally not applicable to those who spent their careers in the pulp and paper industry.
