We have a view that cliché or corporate speak, sometimes called 'offish', enters most organisations at Board and Executive Director level and then cascades down through the organisation, much like the coins in the cascade machines you find in fun fairs. Each level of management is keen to pick up on the in-phrases being used by their superiors and then cascade them in conversation with their subordinates, to demonstrate their 'corporateness' and 'trendiness' or whatever. In some ways this process is linked directly to the corporate Brown-nose day - aka annual performance review.
New words are always been fed into the top of this cascade while the older, well-worn words and phrases eventually pass out of the bottom - plop! We wanted to display this process on a cliché radar, but that sounded too much like a risk radar and that's a cliché that is well on its way down the pan - so we've used a Crapometer. Some phrases (like 'going forward' and 'heads up') are like large turds that just won't go away, hanging around in the system for a very long time while causing huge groans as their sponsors try to pass them on again and again; other phrases (like hide the wiring) flow through the system quite quickly, almost like verbal diarrhoea. Yet more phrases (like 'drill down' and 'outside the box') get caught in the corporate recycling pipe and end up going around the system again and again.
Recent new entries to the Corporate Crapometer include "do your magic...", "deep dive", "we're not time rich" and "big ticket issue" - let's see how long they stick around.
Please submit any further suggestions for subliminal cliché insertion by email the ISMS.
