Insidious management speak has infected the land, from our boardrooms to our school halls

My ears popped as the lift whisked me up to the 27th floor. The doors opened and I was met by a well-dressed secretary who led us to a glass walled meeting room with a stunning view over the city. Two executives wearing jeans greeted me warmly.

Once the small talk was out of the way, we got down to business. "I’d like to tell you about our paradigm shift in strategic talent acquisition strategy which is leveraging value for all our stakeholders", one executive said. After a twenty-minute monologue, he took the final "deep dive into customer centric online interfacing", then mercifully stopped.

Before I could say a word, his colleague began. "By engaging our human capital", she said "we can create a burn-platform that facilitates buy-in".

What any of this meant was beyond me – and I'm a professor at a business school, an academic who has conducted research on the topic we were talking about for over a decade. Was the fault mine, or theirs?

Andre Spicer

At home, as I mulled over my failings, my eyes fell on a little book written by a manager working in a Telecommunications firm. I opened it, and found a description of how corporate life is filled with "no-man’s language" which is "deliberately opaque". Eureka! All this talk about ‘strategic talent acquisition’ wasn’t meant to be understood by men, or anyone else for that matter. It was supposed to confuse me, and everyone else who had the misfortune of hearing it.

After that light bulb moment, I began taking a note of each time I came across empty management speak. Soon I had notebooks full of the stuff, like an anthropologist studying an isolated tribe with a unique language. In this tribe, visiting the lavatory was "taking a bio-break", calling someone on the telephone was "reaching out", hanging up the telephone was "dialing off", sending an email was "inboxing", talking to someone was "touching base", sharing an idea was "thought leadership", going into detail about that idea was "drilling down".

And as I became more attuned to this ridiculous, insidious corporate cant, I realised it wasn’t confined to large businesses. Politicians loved it to. I noticed Priti Patel, the International Development Secretary, was particularly fond of empty language like "outcome-focused models" and "bringing fresh ideas to the table". I discovered government department brimming with business balderdash – like The Department for Exiting the European Union, which describes itself as aiming to "organise ourselves flexibly to deliver our objectives efficiently and effectively".

The Intelligence services are beset, too: by "horizon scanning", "stove-pipping" and "back-casting". The military is festooned with jargon like "acquisitional behaviour competencies", "balanced scorecards", and "high level operating concepts". The NHS employs "lean ninjas" and "quality senseis" to "incentivise" staff to deal with "negative uplifts" (otherwise known as funding cuts). In our schools, head-teachers regular stand in front of stunned pupils as they flick through endless power-point shows about how they are "going forward" with their "strategic metrics".

Management speak has even found its way into the Church of England. In 2014, the Church commissioned a "talent management" programme for "future leaders". A report about the programme mentioned the word "leadership" 171 times. "God" was mentioned 21 times.

Lamenting how this meaningless chatter had taken over our great national institutions, I turned to daily life for some respite. Instead of solid common sense I found the same guff. One friend remembered asking his girlfriend to meet him after work, to which she responded: "what’s the value add?". I came across a prospective father who talked about naming his child as "personal brand design". Another dad talked about how he used "six sigma" techniques to raise his four daughters. I even read a Harvard Business School professor describing marriage as a merger which involve "due diligence", "synergies", "costs of integration", and "strategic execution".

Why are we attracted to this impenetrable tosh. Are people just stupid? Not really – smart, well-educated people are particularly enthusiastic devotees of management speak. Do they lack experience in the real-world? No again. Management jargon is used by even the most seasoned operators.

So why do we use it? Managers told me there were some big gains to be made from business balderdash. Some said it made them look good. By walking into a meeting and firing off bullet points filled with management jargon, they hoped they would be seen as "up to date", "intelligent", and even "inspirational". In this sense, management talk can also be a useful self-confidence trick. By describing themselves as a "Quality Catalyst" or a "Innovation Sherpa", a middle manager can feel a little better about their boring job.

Finally, business bilge is very useful for making it look like you are addressing a tough issue, when in fact you are dodging it. If a CEO says she wants to "aggressively maximise the customer value proposition", they may as well be saying nothing at all.

Empty business speak may make executives feel good, but it comes at a grave cost: confusion. A term like "capability building" means everything and nothing at the same time. So when management speak reigns, no-one knows what others are saying.

What makes matters worse is that the people on the receiving end of this garbage pretend they do understand. The result is deadly mutual ignorance.

Business jargon wastes people’s time and precious resources. When we have to spend our days doing "blue sky thinking", we have less time to actually get on with the job of doing something. Just think how many hours are wasted listening to executives spouting meaningless mumbo jumbo. I shudder to think how much money we spend each year creating, circulating and disposing of this nonsense.

But the most dangerous aspect of management speak is that it can stop us from grasping the real issues. Basking in business bunkum means people in charge can avoid doing something about the obvious problems staring them in the face. Instead of squaring up to the problems and taking tough action to address them, they have pleasant "thought showers" followed by some "horizon scanning". Winston Churchill did not say "I have nothing to offer you but best-practice, talent-pipelines, team-building and strategic-planning".

If we want to save our great institutions and even the English language itself, we need to stamp out meaningless management speak. This means demanding others put executive twaddle into plain English. It also means stopping ourselves from using the latest trendy business tripe. 

By cutting corporate cant, we can stop wasting so much time, energy and resources on puffed-up and empty ideas.

André Spicer’s new book ‘Business Bulls***’ is published this month. Telegraph readers can enjoy 20pc off by entering the code FLR40 at checkout - www.routledge.com/Business-Bullshit/Spicer/p/book/9781138911673