Another favorite is the verb "to re-engineer". This came about, I believe, as a phrase intended to define the re-design of an existing product that works insufficiently or not at all. This sort of thing happens a lot in American business. The phrase also refers to processes in business that aren't working too well ... accounts receivable, supply chain and the like.
"It's not happening, Brad, so let's re-engineer it."
Used as a metaphor, however, it can also be heard in conversations that deal with whether to fire someone or to terminate (also a catch phrase) some or all of a division or working group. "Bob, I want you to re-engineer that sales team in Bogotá. Jorge just doesn't know what he's doing." Here, you're not just introducing more efficient machines or processes. You're re-engineering someone's life for him without attempting to find out how this will affect him or his workers. The faceless word makes the act faceless. The word makes sense when you're trying to manufacture a computer mouse more efficiently. It stands as a barrier behind which you can hide your emotions and the damage you're doing to them — and to those of Jorge and the others — if you're the guy doing the re-engineering of Bogotá.
So important in the manufacturing process, re-engineering in other contexts simply makes easier the ruining of someone's life.
Marketing and sales are the most inventive users of such language for business. Here you have people with almost no skill sets for manufacturing, whose real ability is for gab and obfuscation. So you should not be surprised when the sales person and the marketing V.P. of some company are sitting across from you, not asking whether you need the product they're selling, but instead unleashing a torrent of argot and jargon (a torrent that you've also heard in the meetings held by your own marketing people) about "success" and "the team" and "stake holders", language that is aggressive, euphemistic, wooden, and cliché-ridden.
Now that the North American Free Trade Agreement, and others like it, are fact, and barriers against the wholesale export of American business values and products to the rest of the world have fallen away, the angry hostility that fuels American business has passed beyond the borders and been globalized. Now you can hear the kind of language and feel the wintry freeze of humane values just as easily in Karachi as you can in Kansas, in Kuala Lumpur as in Kentucky, and in Vera Cruz as in Silicon Valley. I happen to know firsthand about all this, incidentally, because of my own years of "success" as a "marketing and sales professional" for "the leading providers" of print services and "Internet software solutions" to Fortune 500 corporations.
Article comments
1 - bliffle
Excellent article!