No one ever wants to hear the words “job cuts” uttered in their direction. But whoever started spreading the idea that people would find it more palatable to learn that their livelihood might be about to disappear in language couched in polysyllabic bullshit needs to be actioned on his own deliverables.
If that means fired.
Corporate claptrap is dribbling out of Britain’s firms, big and small, like waffle from a politician. “Increasing operational leverage through fewer manufacturing sites by redistributing capacity” — that was Britvic this week choking on its own explanation that it’s closing two factories that make Fruit Shoot, J2O and mineral water, and putting 270 people out of a job.
“Restructuring the way we work in head office” — that was Royal Bank of Scotland failing to explain that it’s axing 1,400 jobs over the next two years. And “We will continue to exert tight cost discipline while streamlining processes and procedures” was decoded as meaning that HSBC could cut another 14,000 jobs. When cuts are framed as “headcount management”, it doesn’t sweeten the pill.
Our companies — ours in the sense that we buy their goods, use their services, and pay for their growth via shares and pensions — seem to set out to confuse us.
Here’s Dairy Crest, maker of nothing more complex than cheese and milk, talking about, er, something this week. “The new structure is focused on consumer-driven growth with an integrated supply chain and is consistent with our long-term strategy to build added value sales and drive efficiencies.” No idea what it’s trying to say. But it would probably represent a full house in corporate claptrap bingo.
Click on the “about us” section of most companies’ websites and you’ll be none the wiser. “Listen. Learn. Deliver. That’s what we’re about,” says Dell. Actually, you’re about selling computers.
“We make what matters better, together,” claims Tesco, when what it really makes is farmers unhappy and local independents bankrupt. Vodafone, meanwhile, reckons that “to find that spark that empowers you is why we are in business”. My latest phone bill suggests it’s much more to do with making a profit.
The trend is spreading. Manchester City said it was a “need to develop a holistic approach” that had done it for manager Roberto Mancini. Seems to me that it was his losing a lot of important football matches.
It’s not always so innocuous, though. There are worrying consequences of billion-pound firms going out of their way to dupe us with a deluge of obfuscating lingo. At the height of the financial boom, banks packaged up sub-prime mortgages — those so-called “assets” that led to millions of homes being repossessed and values plunging — in terms so foreign-sounding that few questioned them in case it showed up their own ignorance.
But that didn’t work out so well.
And yet the banks continue to be the worst offenders of corp-speak today.
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Businesses, please speak, and write, plain English. Otherwise we’ll assume you’re hiding behind management-speak to do something dodgy that you don’t want us to understand. Flogging cheap clothes made in awful conditions, perhaps, chucking loans at people who can’t afford them, or secretly feeding us horse. But that would never happen, right?
Twitter @lucytobin
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