Buzzwords and Jargons!

I wrote this article for the newsletter (called The CoP - Campus on Papers) issued by InCult, my Business School Club...and got lots of applauds from the classmates :). Here you go....

One of our professors mentioned this very correctly to us the other day, MBA doesn’t teach you anything. It is just a method of an expensive filtering of the potential candidates for the employers. I couldn’t have agreed less. I don’t like attending classes, even if I do attend, I can be caught sleeping most of the times. I feel that I have paid them huge money, just to let me move around the school’s campus. However, on second thoughts, they do teach you some things here. Buzzwords and the jargons of management world! I have learnt plenty of them since I have been here. They seem to increase with every class. Buzzwords and jargons are meant to give the illusion of substance. They can make a semi-literate, semi-competent person sound smooooooth and polished. Wonder what they can do to the over-competent students over here. For extra effect, add a bunch of acronyms, and you've got yourself a verbal vomit. I always find myself saying, only if they could keep it simple!! I am trying to find a reason for using them while more easily comprehensible vocabulary is at our disposal. Some of the jargons I found worth mentioning:

Leverage – heavily used in finance classes. They use it with numbers there. But I see a broader application. Every action someone takes leverages something else. When I get up in the morning, I leverage my arms to push me up. I leverage my toothbrush to brush my teeth. I then leverage the shower to clean myself. I leverage public transport to take me to the School. I leverage my name tag to identify myself. I leverage networking to find me a job... there's so much leveraging at the School that there should be a "Chief Leveraging Services" thinking outside the box -- anyone who uses this corporate cliché needs to be put in a box. A box with an Oxford dictionary lodged in their skull.Walk through – you don't "walk through" a process. You demonstrate, show, teach, etc. any kind of process. It is always done on boards or on papers, how can I walk through that??

Strategy – this is one big word moving around the School. Anything and everything is strategy. I apply strategy to get admission, I apply strategy for networking, I apply strategy for managing my time, and I apply strategy to find myself a job. This is used as a catch-all phrase by someone who really doesn't know what they are talking about; otherwise they would use more specific language.

Discounting – I have always used this term to get a good bargain when I am shopping. Over here, they use the term for every other thing. You find people discounting cash flows, discounting minor errors, discounting irrelevant experience, discounting a person, discounting rankings, discounting almost everything!!! The only thing the School did not discount is the fees.

Case – For me, it always meant a container. Only until I came here to find that my life revolves around this one word now. We study through case method, we would get cases in our interview, we get these case interview practice sessions, and everyone is talking about cases only! “How would Sydney Olympics make money?” I don’t know why they refer to it as a case, when they could very well have referred it to as a question!

Willingness to pay – reached us through Managerial Economics. For me it’s a buzz word, coz I am an Indian. Indians are cheap. There is nothing wrong in accepting that. They ‘never’ have the willingness to pay for anything. That is why perhaps I could nail the subject; I would always keep the willingness to pay at the minimum.

Enterprise – anyone who uses this word in place of "company" or "organization" is officially a jerk.

Solutions -- the ultimate elixir. Everyone seems to provide a "solution". We were given a case on Siemens in our first term, where Siemens “enterprise” provided eight solutions to its clients. It took me two weeks to figure out that the solutions they provide are basically their product or the services they offer! Unfortunately, this jargon only creates more problems.

Futures and options – nerd alert!!

Value add (noun) or to add value (verb) – Not a single person in our class would ever forget this jargon. Since managerial economics subject, every thing which happens to us is being analyzed through this lens. How will this add value to me? I have this problem of over-hearing people and the other day I saw two guys talking, and one of them goes like this, how does taking bath on a daily basis add value to my life!!??!! Quiet a thought! In fact, the other day I got up at 2 in the afternoon, coz every time I would think of getting up, an MBA educated voice inside me would always shout, “You aren’t adding any value by getting up!!”