Wednesday, June 28, 2006

Business Slang...

I have to include this preface: Sentences full of "business words" make me sad.

Value-Add: "Is this really a value-add feature?" Are you really that big of a value-minus idiot? Would it be so hard to just rearrange your sentence to ask: "Does this feature make the product better?"

Core Competencies: aka stuff I know how to do. E.g. A manager core competencies are non-value-add.

Emergent: This one bothers me because I think people use it as a replacement for the word emergency. "I'm out of the office, but if you have an emergent need, please call me at...". Why not just use the word emergency? Is that extra character to write, or that extra syllable to say really that taxing?

These are the 3 that I came up with right now... but I'm going to start writing down words that people use at work that annoy me.

3 comments:

Mike Dimmick said...

Should be 'urgent need'. An emergent behaviour is a recurring property observed of a system that could not be predicted beforehand.

Actually, I suppose they may have the right word, but an emergent behaviour still does not indicate priority, which I think is what they were trying to convey.

Nikki Chau said...

I hate COB. No, not COB the fish, the acronym COB that stands for Close of Business.

First of all your COB is very different from my COB. And to think about it, we are not a *store*, we don't really have a COB anyway. We might have an EOD, End of Day, but again, my end of day is not your EoD!

Second, why not just say, "x hour on x day?" Like, "4:00pm on Tuesday"? Much clearer and doesn't require obsessive-compulsive people like me to imagine a fish jumping in my face when I read the email.

Anonymous said...

SO funny Nikki. Here it is TWO years later & COB showed up in an email of mine. Being a fisherman & slightly preferring the taste of Halibut I imagined a FISH jumping up, or that the statement of COB was on SALE today or something of that sort. Anyway had to post it was nice to see someone else in the world seen this simple term tends to make things more complicated than necessary. Jay~J