Brave New Words: A User’s Guide To Corporate Speak

With Christmas newly over, many of us are still living in a fantasy world of movies and magic, fuelled by images of Narnia, Middle Earth, Harry Potter, The Lord Of The Rings….small bands of people bound together against insurmountable odds making perilous journeys for a common cause….it’s inspiring and thrilling stuff. It gets into our minds and hearts, reaches to our very core almost imperceptibly, and for an hour or two we can all be heroes.

The pull of this type of romantic, mythological imagery seems to be engrained in almost all of us – the psychoanalyst Carl Jung spoke a lot about what he called archetypes and how they work with the power of the imagination, linking the way people define themselves in the world to unconscious identification with race memories and fairytales passed down through generations. He looked specifically at the many points of similarity in the stories passed down orally through milennia, and how certain “characters” or roles would keep cropping up again and again….the witch figure, the humble hero, the wise woman, the wicked stepmother, and the beast – and he called this the collective unconscious. He put this forward as a way in which many people make sense of the world, and find their own role in it, without consciously thinking about it.

It’s powerful stuff. Take the following:

“They were embarking on a long and challenging journey…inspired and empowered by their mission, the champions sought to overcome barriers by channelling their passion, sharing their learnings, celebrating every experience and breaking new ground. Only by embracing the unknown and boldly going forward would they ensure they had all the tools they needed to aspire to their vision. To identify the touchstone. To strive for the key. To map out their future. For that was their goal….”

Some of these phrases may sound oddly familiar, as though maybe you’ve heard them somewhere before. Well, this thrilling adventure is not taking place in Middle Earth, or Atlantis, or Troy. It’s going on RIGHT NOW in an office near YOU. The question is, are you prepared to sign up for the team?

We live in increasingly sophisticated times, and especially in a tough economic climate it can be hard to motivate employees who are living through a long period of increased stress, financial hardship and work insecurities. But would they feel the same if they felt they were part of a “team” or part of a “family”? How about if they were working towards a “goal”, a “mission”, a “vision”? What if they weren’t actually going to work, but were on an “exciting journey” full of “challenges”?

Suddenly, it all sounds a lot more thrilling. And as if by magic, people can soon find themselves working ridiculously long hours of their own volition, and putting up with unfair demands and conditions in the cause of the company good, the team goal, the mission statement.

It’s great to feel motivated and happy in your work, but it’s also useful to be aware that by creative use of language, companies can sometimes actually be getting their employees to work much harder, for much longer, for much less, and to my mind that’s insidious, cynical, and wrong.

One of Carl Jung’s archetypes is the Joker, and I like to have a bit of a smile, so let’s take a look at some endemic corporate cliches and give them some new interpretations..

• We’re on an exciting journey.. ” We make it up as we go along.”
• We have some challenging targets.. “This is probably impossible..”
• Exciting opportunities for development .. “The management wouldn’t touch this project with someone else’s bargepole”
• We believe in empowering our employees.. “You’re on your own…”

If any of this sounds horribly familiar to you or anybody you know, please remember one of the most important factors in fairy tales and legends is the use of free will. And if you work for a company that overindulges in any of the above, they could well be Tolkien nonsense…

Happy New Year!

 

 

 

 

(Read more about Helena J on the Contributors page or visit her blog, Wonder Words)

Image Source: Flickr

Rekindling my love of reading

As a child I read, a lot! I would go to the library and I would come home with the maximum amount of books that you could take out at one time, I would read them all in about two weeks and then do the same again. I read a lot of Judy Blume, Paula Danziger, Michelle Magorian, Francine Pascal and the Point Horror series.

I just loved getting soaked up in a good story being taken away to some other place with my favourite characters. My love of reading inspired me to do an English degree at University but this somehow killed my love of reading. I went from reading what I wanted and what I was interested in to being told what to read.

The books on the reading list were mainly the classics, you know the ones that you are meant to read so that you can look clever and get the questions right on University Challenge. After university I still had a massive pile of books on my reading list that I just hadn’t got around to and felt I should read. I am also from a very booky family, full of intellects who read a lot and felt like I should try and keep up with them.

But you know what ? This stopped me reading at all, or I would spend hours trying to read something but not getting that whisked away feeling that I used to get with my Judy Blume books and it actually felt like hard work. So last year I decided to stop, stop reading what I thought I should and read what I want and it makes me so happy and I wanted to tell you about a couple of books that I have discovered.

Just before Christmas I was browsing Amazon and in the section ‘Suggestions for you’ I came across ‘Christmas at the Beach Café: A Novella‘ by Lucy Diamond. The blurb for the book was as followed “After a hectic summer running her beach café in Cornwall, Evie Flynn is looking forward to her first Christmas with new boyfriend Ed – she’s determined that it’s going to be the most perfectly romantic one ever. ”

Those of you that know me well will probably understand why this book appealed to me, I am a massive fan of Cornwall and have spent every Summer down there since I was a kid, my boyfriends name is Ed and also I have always dreamt about my own café. I thought “oooo” that sounds like a good match for me.

As I started reading the book the similarities between myself and the lead character, Evie, were startling. I know we have all read characters before and felt like they are like us but this was down to locations, names and circumstances. Evie had moved to Cornwall from Oxford, after breaking up with her partner who had a child from a previous relationship, met her partner Ed, a chef and gone into business together running the café. Again for those who know me, this is exactly how my life has gone over the last two and a half years (bar the move to Cornwall, but it did nearly happen this time last year).

I was so engrossed I read the novella in about two hours and was intrigued to know more about Evie and instantly downloaded the original full novel, ‘The Beach Cafe‘, which explained how Evie got to Cornwall from Oxford. Again I nearly fell off my chair when I read that the office job that Evie was working in, hated and left to go and run her own café was not only in Oxford but on Cornmarket Street and for those of you that don’t know I quit my office job on Cornmarket Street two years ago to set up Fe-line and go out on my own.

As you can imagine I did wonder for a moment if author Lucy Diamond had been stalking me for the last two years of my life and secretly documenting my life into a fiction novel. In fact I actually tweeted Lucy and included a link to The Wandering Kitchen website which details how me and my Ed ended up running our own pop-up restaurant together.

After I had decided that she probably wasn’t stalking me, I realised that when you are doing what you enjoy and meant to be doing, you will find the things that completely and utterly fit. I had left behind my prescribed reading list and had been whisked away again into the world of the characters I wanted to know about and this is where I found my mirror image.

I would thoroughly recommend ‘The Beach Café to all, it is a really good read, there is nothing better at this time of year than escaping to a beach in Cornwall with a young woman who is taking control of her life and figuring out what she was born to do. It’s very Fe-line, Fe-liners.

Tomorrow I will tell you about another inspiring read I read over Christmas, all about how to make your life, easy!

Love and Cornish beaches,