I’ve just finished one of the worst weeks I’ve ever experienced while working for my current employer. I’ll call this employer Idiots Inc. We do hardware, software, middleware, silverware and God-knows-what else. We do it all, and we do it poorly. Actually, most of our products are quite excellent, but through a great deal of hard work and ingenuity, we avoid profiting from them.

Idiots Inc. has all sorts of charming, bad habits. Every year, for example, we rotate all our executives to different divisions. We call this “cross-pollenation” and it’s supposed to unify the organization as a whole. All it really does is ensure that none of the divisions ever get their act together. Executives can’t resist leaving their mark - and I do mean that in the canine sense - on their new organizations, and so the whole company is perpetually f__ked up.

My own sub-division is perpetually managed by overachievers, and so we’re reorganized in some fashion every six months. This year our budget was slashed, and so our VP canned a bunch of people. But then, apparently thinking this wasn’t an epic enough change, he randomly redistributed all the remaining employees to new jobs and departments, largely ignoring such trivialities as “appropriate skill sets” and “experience”. This technique is very similar to the way in which data is completely erased from a disk drive, and the effect on our organization has been similar - nobody has the slightest clue how to get anything done.

I wish I could tell you who I worked for, so that you would know which stock symbol to avoid. But then, it doesn’t really matter, since our stock price is actually an “imaginary number”, like the square root of negative one, or the odds of Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes raising a normal, healthy child.

Yeah, I know it’s Wednesday. Shut up.

I haven’t gotten anything quite bad enough to bother posting, until today. Only a single paragraph of a single memo met the stringent standard for a “golden turd” of corp-speak. But it’s a doozy.

The _ _ _ _ _ _ _ project team … will be comprised of full-time, leveraged and extended members, coordinated to deliver results quickly. Given the need for speed of execution, the team will work collaboratively on two primary areas, design and implementation.

Does that actually tell me anything? Let’s break it down.

1. “The … team … will be comprised of full-time, leveraged and extended members”

What exactly is a “leveraged” or “extended” member? Sounds dirty, to me. I’ve heard “leveraged” a lot lately, for everything. We don’t “sell things at low prices” anymore, we “leverage our competitive cost structure.” The other word is an abolute mystery to me. I bet these words would enhance communication with my wife. “Honey, I’d be happy to leverage that jar of peanut butter for you if you’d leverage my extended member.” Smooth like butta’.

2. “… coordinated to deliver results quickly.”

Sounds good, but why don’t you just tell them to deliver results quickly?

3. Given the need for speed of execution, the team will work collaboratively on two primary areas, design and implementation.

So, um, basically, the team is going to work together? And to make sure things get done quickly, they’re going to start projects and finish them? Holy Shit! That’s revolutionary. How has the human race survived without this innovator? I’m glad he’s one of the people with direct access to the CEO. Our company will dominate the market in no time.

This is an oldie-but-goodie which eerily deplicts how decisions get made at my company.
If anyone knows who I should credit, by all means let me know.

In the beginning was the Plan.
And then came the Assumptions.
And the Assumptions were without form.
And the Plan was without substance.
And the darkness was upon the face of the Workers.

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This golden turd of coporate mumbo-jumbo arrived in my inbox this morning. Enjoy:

Translation:

“We’re going to use a different method of charging customers for our software because we think it will make more money and we’ve hired a guy to figure out how do to it.”

My favorite phrase is “leveraging the connected nature of the network.” Using the network to connect to things? What an innovator! If I’d known it could do that, I’d have bought me one. Somebody please tell this guy about the Internet. He’ll love it.