Tag: jargon

Let go, did you say ?

Corporates come up with abracadabra that is quite difficult to decipher. ‘Let go’ is one such. ‘Let go’ essentially means ‘to get rid of’ in a rather camouflaged manner.

Look at it this way. You are the head of a department and have to retrench but don’t have the wherewithal to say so explicitly. Then you deploy such jargon and say ‘Let go’.

‘Let go’ is the same as ‘cut-down’ but made to sound as though the person left on his own will. It could also be to reduce the ‘guilt consciousness’ of retrenching.

Call it by any other word but you have to go. Period.

Status meeting – anybody ?

If you want to kill time, kill productivity but still fill time and pretend to work, then attend a status meeting.

Ask any corporate executive or IT services worker, he would say on oath that the one event that does not have a specific start and end time but is held regularly to know the status of an activity, is called Status Meeting.

This meeting’s only agenda is to discuss the status of an activity – a project, a task and the like. But everything else other than status gets discussed.

What happens in a status meeting ? Generally a group of ten people gather to discuss on something that never happened all the while pretending that the thing has happened. And that is what happens.

But you had gathered to know the status, right ? So, as you didn’t discuss status, you didn’t know the status. So what do you do to know the status ?

Call for a follow-up status meeting.

And what happens in a follow-up status meeting ?

Go to line 1.

Big picture, any body ?

Don’t get me wrong. Have you been asked to ‘see the big picture’ by your boss ?

If you have been asked to see the big picture, chances are, your boss has got a promotion recently. Once people are promoted to a position much beyond their caliber, they start asking the direct reports to ‘see the big picture’.

You might wonder, ‘Where has this big picture been so far ? if the picture is so  big why didn’t I see it? Better, why didn’t my boss see it?’ There are no specific answers to these. ‘Big picture’ and similar such catch words are signals that the person uttering them ‘has arrived’. 

‘Big picture’ literally means a picture that is big, conveys a whole story rather than piece meal stuff. The boss says ‘big picture’ because he has gone up in the hierarchy and is able to see the whole field while you are still not so advanced in your hierarchy that your vision stays with what your eyes see. And there is nothing much to see from where you are.

‘Big picture’ figuratively means the following :

  1. I am too high in the hierarchy that I can’t see smaller things. I can only see distant stuff as I have grown in the hierarchy and am concerned about the ‘long term vision’.
  2. I have gone higher in the ladder and hence cannot afford to look at smaller issues and concerns, You better look at those mundane stuff as you are still lower in the hierarchy.
  3. Understand that ‘I have arrived’ and better suck up to me.

Now, do you get the ‘big picture’ ? 

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