Time to Downsize Buzzspeak?

Memo to Associates:

In benchmarking our company’s performance against a peer group since our recent re-engineering, we realize that further rightsizing is in order to achieve the efficiencies needed to return to our core competencies. To ensure that this continues to be a high-performance workplace, we will begin outsourcing our human resources functions and convert other departments into cross-functional teams. A paradigm shift is necessary if we are to remain a learning organization in an era of discontinuous change. Our vision is that you empowered intrapreneurs, along with our fast-growing contingent work force, will think out of the box as we implement total quality processes. Our change management expert will contact you to explain our utilization of 360-degree feedback as part of our transformation to a pay-for-performance model.

--Yours in excellence, Chief Learning Officer I.M. Master

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Management mumbo-jumbo like this has become fodder for pundits from humorist Garrison Keillor to cartoonist Scott Adams, whose Dilbert is the fastest-growing strip in the land.

Spawning the patois proliferation is an unprecedented level of corporate turmoil. Fretful middle managers--desperately seeking to hold on to their own jobs--are displaying a voracious appetite for the quick fix. Academics and consultants happily oblige, churning out management tomes--and buzzwords--by the score.

Once the province of big-picture chief executives, “management by bestseller” has filtered down through the ranks. Any old functionary can pick up a hot book these days and turn his office into a buzzword farm. “Business bestsellers”--no longer an oxymoron--can rival top fiction titles in sales.

“People are throwing these buzzwords on the wall to see which ones stick,” said Charles B. Wendel, co-author of “Business Buzzwords: Everything You Need to Know to Speak the Lingo of the ‘90s.”

Given the endless quest for a successful business model, it doesn’t take long for a mouthful like “imaginization” or “activity value analysis” to take on a life of its own.

Business-ese can have its strong points. For those in the know, buzzwords can be a handy way of distilling complex theories into a digestible dollop. And dramatic changes in the marketplace and the workplace certainly dictate the need for reexamining business practices and philosophies at countless corporations.

But beneath the ready acceptance--and the ridicule--lies a serious problem: the potential for buzzwords to become a surrogate for thinking, as misguided managers latch on to poorly understood concepts without puzzling out what ails their companies and tailoring an appropriate response.

Blind adherence to a management theory can backfire--damaging a company’s reputation, harming its ability to compete and making managers the butt of jokes. Consider the accounting firm that barred the use of the term “cubicle” (too demeaning) in favor of “zone of value.”

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“When my so-called boss laid me off, he said, ‘With the reorganization, your position is now surplus.’ I was shocked. The rest of my reaction is unprintable.”

--Jenny G., former utility manager

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Every industry has its jargon, but for sheer potential to affect the lives of workers in the trenches, no other lexicon can top the burgeoning lingo of business.

Ask anybody whose job has been sacrificed to the profit gods: Does it feel better to be “downsized,” or just plain fired?

What has been workers’ response? A form of gallows humor, with cartoonist Adams as the chief buzzword executioner.

With demand soaring for his Dilbertian insights, Adams was able to quit his day job in the Bay Area as a mid-level manager for Pacific Bell. His daily strip and occasional books, such as this summer’s “The Dilbert Principle” and the soon-to-be-published “Dogbert’s Top Secret Management Handbook,” chronicle management gimmickry from the point of view of the lowly cubicle (or zone of value) grunt.

“The advantage of buzzwords, particularly acronyms, is that they’re a more efficient way of communicating,” Adams says. “Eventually, we will be very efficient at talking only to ourselves. All dating and procreation will stop.”

He adds solemnly: “I think there is a dark side.”

Scores of terms lurk within the “popular” management books that publishers gleefully turn out by the truckload. Many of them are quickly adopted into the nomenclature of managers, who use them as a shorthand way of expressing ideas that warrant pages of explanation in management textbooks.

The wave got rolling with Tom Peters and Robert Waterman’s “In Search of Excellence” in the early 1980s, which sought to pinpoint the secrets of high-performance companies. It surged with 1993’s “Re-Engineering the Corporation,” by Michael Hammer and James Champy, which spent 26 weeks on the bestseller lists and has sold nearly 2.5 million copies. Twenty years ago, a big title in the field might have sold 40,000 copies.

At their best, experts say, buzzwords create an efficient form of communication for members of the “management club.”

At their worst, they can mask managers’ inability to figure out what is wrong and fix it. Rather than elucidate, they often obfuscate. And they can serve as excuses for dispiriting, shortsighted strategies--such as the downsizing craze, which now has critics decrying “corporate anorexia” (a favorite term of consultants who, having encouraged companies to chop, now want to share with them ideas for “growing” their companies).

After Nynex, the big New York telephone company, cut thousands of jobs through early retirement--just as the telecommunications market was opening to greater competition--the resulting labor shortage so crippled service that regulators ordered the company to pay customers $50 million in rebates. Nynex ended up hiring back hundreds of new and former employees, many of whom continued to collect retirement benefits.

Buzzwords start sounding antiseptic, tending to dehumanize the intensely human process of managing people. “The use of these buzzwords anesthetizes you to the truth,” said USC management professor Warren Bennis.

With managers raving on about “full-time equivalents” in the same breath as “team-building,” it’s no wonder that employees--er, associates--feel a bit of dissonance.

“There is a stark difference between all of the rhetoric going on in the business world and what’s actually happening,” said Jack Gordon, editor of Training, a Minneapolis trade magazine for “human resource development” professionals.

“All of the talk is about family and community and we’re all a team. Actually, employees are viewed as being expendable.”

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“We’re going through a redesign. Three employee committees directed by management consultants are coming up with new ideas for how to make the company more efficient. People are very skeptical. They suspect the ideas will be used to figure out whom to lay off. The word ‘outsourcing’ is being thrown around a lot.”

--Mark M., engineer at a transportation company

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Robert Kreitner, who teaches management at Arizona State University, says most buzzwords are designed to eliminate resistance to change. Because many managers implement the theories without adequate thought and planning, the efforts are often doomed to fail--a process that further compounds corporate minions’ fear of new schemes.

“Buzzwords breed ‘me too-ism,’ ” said Kreitner, a self-appointed buzzword basher whose fingerprints nonetheless are all over a doozy: “organizational behavior modification,” or “O.B. Mod.”

“We’re like lemmings. We run toward them and then, when the desired results aren’t immediately there, we run away from them. It’s a shame to run away from [solid fundamentals].”

Academics may love to hate buzzwords, but they have only themselves (and the growing legions of management consultants) to blame.

“A lot of this comes from academics who need to be writing something for the journals so they can get tenure,” said Lori Breslow, a communications professor at MIT’s Sloan School of Management. “They’ve really polluted the language environment.”

Buzzwords can serve a purpose, Breslow noted, but “to the extent they’re hackneyed or are used simply to impress, they’re not useful.”

The end of buzzwords is, of course, nowhere in sight. Many managers--and even some workers--swear by the results--or at least like the idea of purported experts pointing them toward possible solutions.

“The value of buzzwords is that they put new ideas and thinking on your radar screen,” said Barbara Kaufman, a Manhattan Beach-based consultant. “[But] you have to look at it in context: What’s your organization trying to accomplish? What’s the fit?”

Moreover, buzzwords have proved to be extremely lucrative and career-enhancing for those who mint them. Authors Peters and Champy are among an elite group of “change management” gurus who command as much as $50,000 each time they speak at a convention or a company retreat.

Professors and consultants have discovered that they can mine management rhetoric of yore by rejiggering syllables or adding a prefix. Hence two similar terms now making the rounds: “hyperfast product development” and “hypercompetition,” contained in the title of a 1994 book about the need for companies to step up the pace of change if they expect to compete.

Business Week latched on to “hypercompetitive” to describe software juggernaut Microsoft Corp.’s penchant for using its dominance in operating systems as a springboard to launch new applications and then quickly moving ahead to the next generation to preempt competitors. (Not so “hyper” was Microsoft’s initial failure to pick up on the Internet’s power, but the company has certainly gone into hyperdrive in an effort to unseat a feisty fledgling, Netscape Communications Corp.).

Speaking of Microsoft, that’s one company that generally eschews management buzzwords, preferring a proprietary buzzspeak. Example: “Let’s double-click on that guy to see how much bandwidth he has on the subject.”

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“After our company merged, the corporate controller from the parent kept referencing ‘activity-based accounting’ and ‘process re-engineering.’ He was preaching the gospel without understanding the real problems of the division. You just don’t march into an organization and start making drastic changes without understanding the fundamentals.”

--Craig B., former vice president of finance for a Southern California high-tech company

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Champy, the consultant whose “re-engineering” ideas helped spark a surge of corporate revamping, has a ready retort when people ask whether he feels guilty about the widespread layoffs perpetrated in the name of re-engineering:

“Re-engineering didn’t put you out of a job. It’s technology and the nature of competition that put people out of work.”

What he and Hammer had in mind was a worthy principle: Organizations must radically rethink the way they do their work and make appropriate adjustments. Just look, he says, at Digital Equipment Corp. and IBM Corp., which failed to see big changes coming and did not adapt quickly enough.

“Companies must do that to remain competitive,” said Champy, whose latest book is “Re-engineering Management.” But he acknowledges that when management theories get “commoditized,” people can become cynical, and “when they get cynical, you can lose the importance of a very good idea.”

Told of a new book, “Co-Opetition,” by two professors from Harvard and Yale, he said: “I find it almost too inventive. It’s exactly the creation of those kinds of words that gives rise to this jargon debate.”

The book’s authors, Adam M. Brandenburger and Barry J. Nalebuff, freely credit Ray Noorda, the founder of the networking software company Novell, with devising the term “co-opetition,” as in “a revolutionary mind-set that combines competition and cooperation.”

They are perhaps prouder of a term they did coin: “complementor,” which they describe as the natural counterpart to “competitor.” In the book, they feature semiconductor maker Intel Corp. as an example of a complementor--a company that believes in collaborating on products and projects with customers, suppliers and even competitors for the benefit of all. Sure enough, the word recently got an official endorsement from Intel’s highly regarded CEO, Andy Grove, who mentioned it in a Fortune magazine interview.

“Here’s a word we really think should enter a dictionary,” Brandenburger said.