I was reading something on a Linkedin forum. I know, ok? I’ve never really seen the point of it. You can ‘connect’ with people, but you can on Facebook and see what they had for dinner and what their cat looks like too. I think Linkedin would say it’s ‘more professional,’ because you can post your CV up and well, join in discussions. Maybe without getting in fights with total strangers the Facebook way. Although reading this morning, my first reaction was to start TYPING IN CAPITALS to show how annoyed I was. And that was when I was agreeing with someone.
It was only a thing about avoiding jargon. Harmless enough, yes? Well no, actually. Not harmless at all.
Very often, the evaluator is a young, relatively inexperienced person who has come of age in a fast -paced, digital world highly dependent upon graphics, very light on lengthy paragraphs, living in the present, unversed in the subtle distinctions of grammar.
By deduction then, we should perhaps become less inclined to favor a narrative approach to our proposals, in favor of a graphical one.
Ignore the thing about living in the present, because only a few remaining people who remember Jethro Tull are actually living in the past. Just ignore it. What we’re saying here is that somebody who needs cartoons to understand something has been given the job of evaluating million-pound proposals. Say, to build a motorway, or get the bins emptied outside every house in a city every Tuesday morning (tender must include option dates for Christmas collections). How do we deal with that?
Cut and paste little bags of money in the costs section? Maybe it’s the way forward. I’m assuming we’re not going to look at the option of actually hiring anyone who can read and write properly, because that might be a bit threatening and disrupt the office dynamic. I think I’ve got that right.
The blood pressure really became an issue when I clicked on the next article. It was about integrating marketing information with business strategy and whether it was a good idea. You do know. Whether what the business should do next should be based on facts or what the chairman’s wife thought she heard at the hairdresser’s. The use of the words business and strategy in that order alone should have told me not to read it. This definitely did:
“A nice process description. I would add the need for the strategist to interwork with people in the internal team as well as the customers. By communicating the strategy internally you gain buy-in, acceptance and alignment of the organisation with the strategic goals so that all employees that contact the customer are on the same message.”
I’m quite good at work but I don’t know what interwork is. Apart from pompous, redundant drivel.
And no, I can’t think of a cartoon graphic that would illustrate the concept, apart from an enormous ass. As for gaining acceptance and alignment – let me see. Does that mean you tell people what the company’s going to do in an attempt to get them to accept it and so that staff don’t totally piss-off the customers by telling them rubbish? It’s an idea, certainly.
So why not say so?
