Sunday, June 7, 2009

Buzzword Bingo and a Memo That Came -- Seriously

Remember the "buzzword bingo" game that you used to play in meetings? The one where you got points if someone said "stake in the ground" or "win-win" or any one of myriad other abused business phrases?

Get a load of this email we received. We offer it for your entertainment. It was sent without humorous intention, and would be uproariously funny if it weren't so sad. We offer it unedited -- but italicized and appended in [brackets]-- for your enjoyment:
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For context, our work and vision is focused on radically improving the end-to-end enterprise software and product development throughput / quality challenge [Here at the end of this sentence we are no closer to an understanding of what these people do than we were at the beginning; they appear to be speaking a foreign tongue]. I’ll leave the sales pitch out [thank goodness, one wonders how unintelligible THAT would be], but know that our latest data shows a typical 40-50% overall throughput improvement (after the application of Lean-Agile practices) and more importantly, a dramatic improvement to economic and operational returns based on substantially better business outcomes driven by a different approach to software development alignment [We are awash in a sea of prepositional gibberish]. When we meet we will walk you through our Lean-Agile execution / operating models and how they lead to these kinds of sustainable outcomes.

I suspect this subject [We're two paragraphs in and have no sense of what the subject even IS] is likely of some interest, so let me know if your schedule permits a brief visit.
[We're inclined to print out our card and accept the meeting...but only for the sheer delight of shouting "bingo" midway through it.]
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Puh-lease. Not all of us are ponderous IT consultants. Speak English. The simple kind that even we laypeople understand. For everyone's sake...and especially that of your bottom line.

1 comment:

Dave Van de Walle said...

I've decided to take a different approach with my own marketing. Here's the letter campaign:

"We sell stuff that can help you do your job better. I'll call you and we'll figure out if it makes sense to have a meeting that won't waste each other's time."