These children could be made homeless
This story was reported by the BBC yesterday – Councils get banned jargon list - a great step forward, as people working in the public sector are more guilty of this than anyone – EVEN MARKETING! – Ms Eaton said: “Why do we have to have ‘coterminous, stakeholder engagement’ when we could just ‘talk to people’ instead? I couldn’t agree more!
We’ve taken our dislike of these corporate clichés one stage further at Original Software, and, rather than a blanket ban enforcement, we’ve levied a corporate tax on the use of a whole list of words. Just 20p (or 50p for our most hated – ‘Leverage’ and ‘Paradigm Shift’) has, over the past month or so, tallied up to about £100. We’ve taken the decision to donate it to a really good cause that we have recently been alerted to – an orphanage in Nepal that is about to be made homeless!
George Wilson (our Operation Director)’s daughter is doing voluntary work with the children out in Nepal at the moment, and has found out the awful news that the orphanage is likely to have to close because the landlord is selling the premises. They are now desperately trying to raise £20,000 in order to secure a new home for their children. This is tragic news as the children have nowhere to go but back on the street. Good orphanages are rare and corruption is rife out there. They are great kids and deserve so much more from this world. We’d love to open people’s eyes to the children’s plight and gain as much sponsorship and support for this cause as possible.
Our list of ‘taxable words and phrases’ include: High altitude view, Holistic approach, Blue sky thinking, Think outside the box, On/off my radar, Brain dump, Good to go, Raise the flagpole, Heads-up, Touch Base, Grey area, Bandwidth, Let’s take that offline, Cascade information, 360 thinking, Triage, Drop the ball, Take a rain cheque, Going Forward, Sort the wheat from the chaff, singing from the same hymn sheet, My door is open on this issue, and the use of ‘did we…’ when someone blatantly means ‘did you’ (this was our highest earner)!
Anyway, more to come later on our efforts to raise cash for the orphanage and the progress we make, if you are interested in the cause or want to help out, please feel free to get in touch.
How do you expect to build grass root-level synergies without touching base with key stakeholders in a manner facilitated by such syntactical markers in a real-time sense? Come, come, let us not apply lipstick to the pig here, without picking the low-hanging fruit we run the risk throwing the baby out with the bath aqua. I’d suggest some type of self-facilitating media node – perhaps a wiki of some sort, or even a poggler – which to run up your corporate flagpole, and see who salutes it.
Comment by Jason — March 25, 2009 @ 11:47 am
Great post! Just wanted to let you know you have a new subscriber- me!
Comment by KrisBelucci — June 2, 2009 @ 1:39 am
How soon will you update your blog? I’m interested in reading some more information on this issue.
Comment by GarykPatton — June 16, 2009 @ 10:17 am
[...] the three Hampshire-based golf courses and playing 18 holes at each course, they, along with others at the company will be aiming to raise £5000 sponsorship to help with some of the costs of securing a new home [...]
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