Driving home today I fell in behind a pickup truck with an odd homemade bumper sticker. Composed of individual stick-on letters, it read:
drafting is not an act its an art winston salem cars are not apart
Was he trying to say something about tailgating? Probably, but what? Never mind the missing apostrophe, the words didn’t make sense.
It made me think of those execu-speak vision statements you see on office walls: “Committed people advantaging our Clients interest’s,” that sort of thing. God knows, when corporate bigwigs display their ignorance of English, wise underlings check their tongues and pretend the words make sense. Politically savvy underlings make the words make sense by advantaging everything they can get their hands on.
The US Air Force has its own blue-suited corporate leaders, of course, and consequently its own execu-words. In my day, “having visibility over” projects and processes was the rage.
No, I don’t know the origin of the phrase, but am willing to bet it started with a three- or four-star general. Like this: the higher-ranking general told a lower-ranking general he wanted visibility over some project the lower-ranking general’s division was working on, meaning that he wanted to enhance his ability to micro-manage the project by knowing everything that was going on as it was going on. The lower-ranking general, in turn, demanded visibility over the project from his colonels; the colonels demanded it from the majors; suddenly everyone was saying “visibilize me.” Unit vision and strategy statements were rewritten to embrace visibility in all its forms, downward, upward, and lateral. Two years later visibility was suddenly replaced by transparency, and down came all the posters.
During visibility’s heyday I refused to use the word in any sense other than the meterological. Execu-speak made my skin crawl, but I was no fool and kept my thoughts to myself. I confess that I’m a little ashamed of myself for that.
Today, of course, I no longer have to be political. The guy in the pickup truck was no boss of mine . . . I should have tailgated the illiterate son of a bitch all the way home, then rear-ended him for good measure.
Bureaucracies have always been plagued by wordsmithing and give-it-a-name-itis, and the peacetime Air Force is just another big bureaucracy, with a military flavor. I suppose it has something to do with being original, which is hard to do. How else to standout from the crowd? How many times have we seen an old idea resurrected with a new name? Do you remember all the posters for “Zero Defects?” I wonder when that idea will come around again, and in what guise? Sooner or later, someone will come up with the truth, “Lie-a-na-zation.”
Dick, I just remembered another: robusting. Whenever we’d deploy somewhere, there’d be a push to “robust” the package – add a couple of jets, a few pilots, more maintainers, and another pallet or two of spare parts. The idea was to bring 12 aircraft vice 10 so that you could better guarantee an 8 turn 8 turn 4 flying schedule at the deployment base.
I remember Zero Defects. And its follow-on, Management by Objective. Which was eclipsed by Total Quality Management. Each management-school fad was more pussified than the one before. When I went to PACAF to be chief of flight safety, they first sent me to TQM training. Now *that’s* something I don’t like to admit, and it’s not on my resume!
Today, from what I hear, two new fads are at play: Christian Identity and the fetishisation of flag rank. Speaking of the latter, check this out:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/07/17/AR2008071703161.html?referrer=emailarticle
I’m working up a righteously indignant post on that one, so stay tuned!
It’s good to hear from you. How’s tricks?