The CEO-to-English Phrase Book, a continuing series from Slate

Date:March 28, 2005 / year-entry #78
Tags:non-computer
Orig Link:https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20050328-00/?p=36063
Comments:    10
Summary:I'm an economics geek, so of course I'm a fan of Slate's Moneybox column as well as The Dismal Science and most of all, Steven Landsburg's gleefully provocative Everyday Economics. I'm also a language geek, so I've been quite enjoying the occasional Moneybox articles which decode CEO speak into plain English titled The CEO-English Phrase...

I'm an economics geek, so of course I'm a fan of Slate's Moneybox column as well as The Dismal Science and most of all, Steven Landsburg's gleefully provocative Everyday Economics. I'm also a language geek, so I've been quite enjoying the occasional Moneybox articles which decode CEO speak into plain English titled The CEO-English Phrase Book, thereby combine two geek topics into one.

Terms that have been defined so far:

Comments (10)
  1. Andy says:
    March 28, 2005 at 7:11 am

    My favorite recently observed business term:

    Simultaneous Legally Unrelated Transactions

    You can figure out the acronym yourself.

    :-)

    This was a term used by Worldcom and Enron to describe business dealing between the two companies.

  2. Jesus says:
    March 28, 2005 at 9:32 am

    I noticed that most CEO Speak analyzed Mr. Gross’ analysis is that the result of those awful Republican policies. Therefore, if we kill all the Republicans CEOs would obviously be free to say what they mean…obviously.

  3. mschaef says:
    March 28, 2005 at 11:30 am

    This book might be of interest to readers of this post.

    http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0743269098/qid=1112037679/sr=8-1/ref=sr_8_xs_ap_i1_xgl14/103-3807709-3299049?v=glance&s=books&n=507846

  4. alfons says:
    March 28, 2005 at 12:35 pm

    "Pro-active" comes to my mind too..

  5. Steve Hall says:
    March 28, 2005 at 3:34 pm

    My current malevolent favorite is "transitioned".

    E.g., Steve is being transitioned in a couple of months.

    Meaning: Steve is getting RIFed… (Unfortunately true.)

    British version: Steve is being made redundant… (Although I think the British version is also a product of CEO-speak…)

  6. Steve Hall says:
    March 28, 2005 at 3:46 pm

    I just realized that "legacy cost" could be applied to the cost of my vacation payout and severance when I get RIFed.

    Well, at least when I hear it in the hallway amongst HR reps, managers, and bean counters, I’ll know what they’re whispering about!

    Raymond’s blog is TRUELY a source of never-ending useful trivia! (I view Raymond’s blog as sort of a "Hitchhiker’s Guide through Windows and Sometimes Other Things"…taking up where Douglas Adams left off!)

  7. David Candy says:
    March 28, 2005 at 7:01 pm

    http://www.dack.com/web/bullshit.html and you can set goals like

    incubate robust ROI

    brand extensible architectures

    leverage collaborative interfaces

    (Gee I’m starting to sound like a MS employee)

    and from

    http://www.weaselwords.com.au/

    ‘Recognising that a national framework for comparison of water accounting systems can encourage continuous improvement leading to adoption of best practice..’

    The National Water Initiative

    ‘Filtering. After "ideation" ideas must be "filtered". This process involves the following steps: strategic alignment with the vision on where to take the company, competitive differentiation, first scan attractiveness of the idea, feasibility organisational capabilities to execute cross-department inclusion, consistency of process, buy-in to output.’ Report provided by consultants Booz Allan Hamilton to 7-Eleven Australia..[Thanks to Andrew Manning]

  8. metamerist says:
    March 28, 2005 at 7:18 pm

    If you like Landsburg’s column, these may be worthy of perusal. (Note: Friedman puts a lot of stuff online.)

    Henry Hazlitt’s "Economics in One Lesson"

    http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0517548232/qid=1112066218/sr=8-1/ref=pd_csp_1/104-1993656-3308768?v=glance&s=books&n=507846

    David Friedman’s "Hidden Order: The Economics of Everyday Life"

  9. Charlie T. says:
    March 29, 2005 at 4:57 am

    British readers will know about a 1990’s TV show called Drop the Dead Donkey, a brutally satirical comedy about a TV newsroom. It was filmed a few days before transmission so it would be topical. There was a character called Gus Hedges, the boss of the station, who used to talk nothing but management-speak nonsense.

    Typical quote:

    "Could we interlock brain-spaces in my work area?"

  10. foxyshadis says:
    March 29, 2005 at 12:01 pm

    KJR has a continuing series of management-speak translations every weekly column, though it’s not analysed like these are.

    http://www.issurvivor.com/

Comments are closed.


*DISCLAIMER: I DO NOT OWN THIS CONTENT. If you are the owner and would like it removed, please contact me. The content herein is an archived reproduction of entries from Raymond Chen's "Old New Thing" Blog (most recent link is here). It may have slight formatting modifications for consistency and to improve readability.

WHY DID I DUPLICATE THIS CONTENT HERE? Let me first say this site has never had anything to sell and has never shown ads of any kind. I have nothing monetarily to gain by duplicating content here. Because I had made my own local copy of this content throughout the years, for ease of using tools like grep, I decided to put it online after I discovered some of the original content previously and publicly available, had disappeared approximately early to mid 2019. At the same time, I present the content in an easily accessible theme-agnostic way.

The information provided by Raymond's blog is, for all practical purposes, more authoritative on Windows Development than Microsoft's own MSDN documentation and should be considered supplemental reading to that documentation. The wealth of missing details provided by this blog that Microsoft could not or did not document about Windows over the years is vital enough, many would agree an online "backup" of these details is a necessary endeavor. Specifics include:

<-- Back to Old New Thing Archive Index