Here is even more of the episodic publication of The Management Contradictionary (Benjamin Marks, Rodney Marks, and Robert Spillane. Michelle Anderson Publishing: Melbourne).
It’s available in all good libraries, and quite a few bad ones, too. It’s in alphabetical order, so feel free to keep reading the blog posts until you get to z, or zzz.
The Management Contradictionary defines the real meaning behind management terms.
bull market
Environment in which shares are traded on the basis of bull received from companies.
bullshit
What stops managers killing each other.
bureaucracy
Multi-layered black hole into which people, physical resources, money and time are sucked, never to reappear.
bureaucrat
A crat who has fallen from the mantle onto the bureau.
business cycle
Not what it used to be, and never was. Neither caused by business nor a cycle. It is caused by government printing money without backing, and business being defrauded by it.
business ethics
- All manner of good and bad things as good and bad, but not necessarily in that order.
- Moving set of temporary values created by organisations to quash uninformed criticism from government and shareholders.
business expenses
- Items successfully claimed as tax deductions.
- Items bought with government money for private benefit.
business lunch
- A way to accumulate frequent intake incentives
- A way to accumulate frequent imbibe brownie points
- A method to benefit from feeding and watering the cattle class
- Putting the quid into quid pro quo
- A bribe
- Positive reinforcement
- A bargaining chip for extortion
- A bargaining chip for blackmail
- A bonus
- A carrot to an individual in order to stick it to a group
- Wholesaling retail influence peddling
- Extraction of personal gratification from professional negotiations
- Intimacy with legitimacy
- Precursor to a post-prandial nap
- Precursor to cursing.
business model
A reverse-engineered retrofitted abstraction of reality, accurate after the fact, because of the fact.
business objective
The second part of the two-part ubiquitous training program, ‘Business Aims and Objectives’, which has no relationship to what executives think about, talk about or actually do.
business park
- A campus whose premises are based on assumptions.
- An oxymoron, like fun run, petty cash, spend thrift, job security, crisis management and home office.
business plan
Hypothetical and theoretical, tentative and hesitant pathway to the future, measured in various time periods, although no-one has ever seen a five-year plan in its fifth year.
buying-in
The psychological process of requiring employees to agree with bosses.
buzz words
Enthusiastically ambiguous expressions used to assert the status of the speaker whilst promising nothing.
(See above and below)
by-product
Something tangential that might come out of your core business process; especially useful if that process is a dud.
call centre
The home of highly skilled, headset-wearing, omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent, polyglot human knowledge repositories with nice telephone manners, condescended to by tomorrow’s dole recipients.
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