Most of us would agree that our jobs are made less pleasant by all sorts of things we can’t control, from the fluorescent lights and gray cubicle felt to the cranky copier and the underpowered microwave. There are human problems, including bullies, liars, and people who watch soap operas on tiny TVs at their desk while eating the loudest, crunchiest pretzels in the universe. But we also have too many meetings, too many reports, too many forms, and too many emails that we don’t really need to read.
These are signs that your big company is less concerned about running a tight ship and more concerned about staying a big company. The more sloppiness and waste your company tolerates, the less it cares about actual work. That’s a bad thing. But there are other ways to measure how much common sense your company has sacrificed on the altar of bureaucratic nonsense. Keep Reading…
Do your eyes glaze over with the vacant stare of a dairy cow when reading most company websites, brochures, case studies, and white papers? Once I interviewed with a company whose tag line was Trust. Value. Integrity. It took me forever to figure out what their business was. After scouring their site and search engines, I deduced they were loan origination technology developers. Can you imagine what this does to potential business? Their website was jargon-jammed with corporate speak and communicated nothing. The powers-that-be who insist on cliché, jargon and words with no marketplace meaning undermine their own profit potential and branding power. As E.B. White wrote in The Elements of Style, these are the leeches that infest the pond of prose, sucking the blood of words. Let’s take a look at a few of the offenders.
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During family dinners in my household, we’d all bring an item from the kitchen to the table. None was exempt from this ritual. No matter who cooked dinner that night, everyone ended up contributing to the meal because of what they brought to the table. What they brought was incidental–the fact they brought something was what was important.
The same applies in a work environment–especially in meetings. We all have different things we bring to the table. What we bring often depends on the role we have in the organization or the area of expertise we apply every day to our work. None of these are really any different than setting a dinner table – every part of the meal is important.
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