The Buzz on Buzz Words

There’s alot written about collaboration and innovation today.   More buzz than anything else.   It’s actually kind of funny to read how companies will not survive if they don’t innovate in the future and collaboration is the key to innovation.   Okay, I do not think there are any new revelations here and if I’m a CEO of a company, you’re probably telling me something I aleady know.   

But I often wonder how this buzz starts and spreads like a virus.    Perhaps it’s when someone writes a book about how the flat world is at a tipping point.     I mean if I hear one more person talk about tipping points, I might have to drink myself into oblivion until I reach my tipping point.    Maybe it’s the management consultants who need to dream up new ways of making businesses think they need their services.   Better yet, it starts in universities where MBA students pick up these buzz words from professors who invent them as if they discovered a vaccine for polio.   And the MBA students feel the need to use these buzz words to sound intelligent….resulting in MBA-speak or MBA-ese.     Now I have my MBA and it’s a great experience and I was lucky that my program discriminated against anyone who spoke MBA-ese.   

Anyway, I figured I’d look up “buzzword” and here is the definition.   A buzzword (also known as a fashion word or vogue word) is a vague idiom, or a neologism, that is commonly used in managerial, technical, administrative, and sometimes political environments.   

Wow!   “a vague idiom” or “neologism”.   I didn’t think you could define buzzword with other buzzwords!   Would it not be easier to simply say “buzzword” = B.S.    Wikipedia even compiles a list of popular buzz words and links to a bunch of websites that attempt to compile them all.    One of my all time favorites is “low hanging fruit”.   And “peel back the onion”.   I also love “resource action” which means you’re fired, layed off, terminated, thanks for playing and game over!      Ah…then there is “synergies” and you always have to say that word with both hands and fingers together.  I also had one manager who always talked about how he’d “circle-back”.   With all the circling back he was doing, it was pretty obvious that nothing and no one was moving forward.   

And for the longest time I thought off-shoring and outsourcing were the same until someone explained it to me.  Thank goodness I now know the difference because I recently spoke with the store I ordered furniture from … and they told me that our furniture was outsourced to a manufacturer in China who in turn off-shored it to Vietnam and that’s why it is taking over 5 months to be delivered.  

So what does this all have to with collaboration technology?   There must be a point to all this…. maybe it’s that collaborative technology connects people and in some strange way actually enables all this off-shoring and out-sourcing to occur much easier.   Well, sure, in some way it does.   But I think the bigger point here is that before you go and create a wiki for your project or company and start defining all the company acronyms or decide to promulgate your esoteric cogitations — goto wikipedia first and look up the definition of  buzzwords  to remind yourself that the intended use of this technology is to provide clarity and visibility and actually reduce complexities…..