We have a view that clichés or corporate speak, sometimes called 'offish', enter our organisation at Board and executive level and then cascade on down through the organisation, much like the coins in the cascade machines you find in fun fairs. Each level of management is keen to pick up on the in-phrases being used by their superiors and then cascade them in conversation with their subordinates, to demonstrate their 'corporateness' and 'trendiness' or whatever. In some ways this is linked directly to our corporate 'brown-nose' day.
New words are always been fed into the top of this offish cascade while the older, well-worn words and phrases fall out of the bottom - plop! However, some phrases get stuck and hang around in the system for a while causing groans as their sponsors try to pass them on again and again, whereas other phrases flow through the system quite quickly, like verbal diarrhoea.
Our current organisational plop-ometer looks a bit like this:
Corporate business-speak and cliché plop-ometer
cascade
This month I'm starting a 'let's unobtrusively introduce a cliché into office meeting discussions and see who runs with it' campaign; the phrase I'm currently using is "we need to hide the wiring" - let's see how it fairs in the plopometer - SLR-R.
Please submit any further suggestions for subliminal cliché insertion by email the ISMS. back to top
