My wife forwarded an e-mail to me yesterday with some "New Words for
2005--Essential vocabulary additions for the workplace (and
elsewhere)." The list included 19 terms reflecting both workplace
and societal phenomena. Here are my six "unfortunate" but funny favorites
with relevance to innovation:
-
BLAMESTORMING—Sitting around in a group, discussing why a deadline was missed or a project failed, and who was responsible.
- SEAGULL MANAGER—A manager, who flies in, makes a lot of noise, craps on everything, and then leaves.
- ASSMOSIS—The process by which some people seem to absorb success and advancement by kissing up to the boss rather than working hard.
- SALMON DAY—The experience of spending an entire day swimming upstream only to get screwed and die in the end.
- ADMINISPHERE—The rarefied organizational layers beginning
just above the rank and file. Decisions that fall from the adminisphere
are often profoundly inappropriate or irrelevant to the problems they
were designed to solve.
- 404—Someone who is clueless. From the World Wide Web error
message "404 Not Found," meaning that the requested site could not be
located.
So do you remember what your elementary school teacher would say
whenever you learned a new word? Use it in a sentence! So
here you go:
Seagull managers live as 404s in the adminisphere, encouraging
blamestorming and engaging in assmosis, while creating salmon days for
their subordinates.
All of these terms are sad but true reflections of what's actually going on in
today's organizations. What do you do to defeat these ways of
thinking and acting? Have you coined your own terms to describe
similar things you've experienced in your organization? Please
share your thoughts and add to our vocabulary list!
