More sad-but-all-too-true definitions from CRAPCOMM

ARCHITECTURE.   All the crappy DOS programs below the glossy Surface.   The skeleton that supports the body corporate.  Commonly used with the word “open,” as in OPEN ARCHITECTURE,  a structure which is flexible enough to change at a moment’s notice and strong enough to be impervious to major and minor modifications.  The fact that this is a contradiction in terms is one that is deliberately ignored by everyone from IT programmers to executives, all of whom believe that you can add an eighth floor to a four-story walk-up without actually building floors five through seven. 

What most corporate architecture looks like.

AUTHENTIC.  The approved version of false.  An authentic conversation, for instance, consists of all the backstabbing your boss wants to hear, not the backstabbing you want to say. 

BANDWIDTH.  The current sexy term for “plate.” In the old days, when you said, “My plate is full,” your boss would say, “Okay; we’ll get somebody else to do it.”  This is because plates are only so big.  Bandwidth, on the other hand, can always be increased—and it’s your responsibility if it isn’t.  Which is why these days you don’t tell your supervisor, “I don’t have the bandwidth for that,” because this means you are not willing to work overtime and weekends to get the job done.  Also—and more importantly—the phrase, “We don’t have the bandwidth for that” can never ever (ever) be said by any CEO about his company, because it implies that the company is as old, outdated and slow as the CEO.   

BUSINESS MODEL.  The way a company says it does business, as opposed to the way it actually does business.  The corporate version of an essay outline which makes perfect logical sense, and is then totally ignored because you haven’t written a word in weeks and the stupid thing is due first thing in the morning so now you’re going to stay up all night and type like Hunter Thompson on Ibogaine until the required number of pages and/or words is met,  just so you can have something to meet the deadline.  (See DELIVERABLE.) 

CANCER RESEARCH.  Corporate term for any long-range project which can never actually be completed, because when it is, it will result in the loss of millions of dollars in funding.   

CHANGE MANAGEMENT.  Renovating the building to support the penthouse.  In essence, “asking” employees who were hired to do Job A to “transition” to Job B, usually without any training or preparation, because (a) Job A is no longer making the firm any money, (b) the people currently doing Job B are so overwhelmed with work that nothing is getting done, or (c) the barbarians are at the gates, and the only way to hold the line is to deploy as many Job B warm bodies as possible against the onslaught while the CEO goes on TV to tell worried investors that everything’s under control. 

This used to be called “restructuring,” until the word came to imply that there was something wrong with the corporate structure to begin with—an admission which can never be made publicly, but which is always discussed on a daily basis in whatever after-work bar employees gather to blow off steam.  During which marathon, somebody will make the excellent point that if an executive with actual management skills had been calling the shots from the beginning, any change would not be necessary.  And then, after a couple of rounds of tequila shots, somebody else will sum it all up with the words: “The good news is, you’re still on the boat.  The bad news is, it’s still the Titanic.” 

CORE COMPETENCY.  The one thing a person or a company does best.  The thing you hire them for.  Until all hell breaks loose.  (See CHANGE MANAGEMENT.) 

CORE INCOMPETENCY.  The many things a manager cannot do, all of which you are expected to do for him.  (See TEAM PLAYER.) 

CULTURE, CORPORATE.  The catch-all phrase which describes the many unwritten rules of behavior, status recognition, and departmental warfare which must be obeyed by all full-time employees and permatemps.  These rules are neither explained nor invoked until and unless they are broken, in much the same way as a land mine is not discovered until you step on it.  Ignorance of the unwritten law is no excuse.  Whatever you did to get the stink-eye or the awkward silence, you should have known enough not to do it.  If you’re lucky,  someone will take you aside and inform you that you just spit in church by saying something like “Just so you know,” “A word to the wise,” and “In case you were wondering.”  Like fortune cookies which always attain their true meaning by adding the words “in bed,” the above three reminders achieve their true passive-aggressive brilliance by sub-vocally adding the words “you moron.”    

The word “culture” is also used in public relations as a loose synonym for “the really cool way we do business,” which makes it a verbal prophylactic to prevent the unwanted children of all business relationships, namely accusations of greed.  So you will hear a lot of talk about a company’s CULTURE OF EXCELLENCE (which means not doing things in the best way, just the best way we know how), its CULTURE OF COMPLIANCE (which means obeying every law the company has previously broken), its CULTURE OF RESPONSIBILITY (which means firing support staff whenever a manager makes a mistake), and its CULTURE OF TOLERANCE (which means not pointing to the gay albino in the wheelchair and saying “Look at that gay albino in the wheelchair!”). 

CULTURE CARRIERS.  Old people we haven’t gotten around to firing yet. 

JOB SECURITY.  Obsolete term for an employee’s belief that doing a single job and performing up to and beyond expectations will guarantee her a seat at the corporate table until she decides to retire.  The current term for this belief is “living in a dream world.”   

QUALITY CONTROL.  Making sure that everything shares the same low standards.

TALENT.  Wage slaves who can be monetized.   

TALENT, RETENTION OF.  Patting your wage slaves on the back for a job well done by compensating them with something other than money, and then claiming that whatever you’re giving them is more valuable than money, which helps to support the myth that there is actually something more valuable than money.   

TRANSPARENCY.  Making sure that all the profit-making loopholes are invisible to outside auditors and easily accessible to internal analysts.   

TRANSPARENCY, CREATE.  Regulatory sleight-of-hand. An investment bank will use the phrase “ create transparency” the same way a stage magician uses the phrase “Nothing up my sleeve.” 

UPGRADE.  Improve to failure.

 

ZERO TOLERANCE.  A policy which is applied without exception to everyone in the firm who is not an exception.  Saying a company has zero tolerance for sexual harassment, shady business practices, and anything that damages its reputation is like the NBA saying that it will always call a player for traveling—in both cases, the franchise players are exempt from the rule.  This is also pretty much how the Justice Department deals with investment banks in this country: they have zero tolerance for everything that everybody else does.  If Moses had come down from the mountain with the Commandments of Corporate America, there would only have been one of them: “Thou shalt never fail to produce results, because results always trump morality.”



Copyright 2014 Matthew J Wells

Some excerpts from CRAPCOMM: The Devil's Dictionary of Corporate Communications

ACTION ITEMS. A fancy term for your current workload, which used to be called “assignments” back when people didn’t take offense at being assigned tasks by their bosses.  But these days—when bosses are all called supervisors, like glorified hall monitors, because of Corporate America's rampant “I am the boss of me” sense of entitlement—which means that a supervisor can’t actually order around subordinates without making them feel like, well, subordinates— the Powers That Be want their slaves to feel like their chains are a fashion choice.  So it took Corporate America no time at all to come up with a sexy synonym that implies adventure instead of subservience and mind-numbing drudgery. This is particularly ironic because the main features that make up an action movie (adventure, violence, profanity and sex) are the same for an action item (the adventure is not getting fired, the violence is visions of killing your supervisor, the profanity is muttered under your breath, and the sex is you being fucked over).

 

ACTION FIGUREHEADS. Supervisors who promise change, results, and transformationals, and then assign the real work to you.

 

BEST PRACTICES.  What a company does until it gets caught doing it.  In theory, “best practices” means rigorously obeying the letter of the law as opposed to squeezing through the usual loopholes.  In practice, it means breaking the law without actually alerting the regulators that a crime has been committed.  All investment banks promote best practices as a standard; the fact that they continually have to promote them at all gives you some idea of how standard they really are.

 

CHALLENGING.  Impossible.

 

CHALLENGING ECONOMIC CONDITIONS.  (Also known as CHALLENGING ECONOMY.)  The current panic-free synonym for Depression, replacing the previous panic-free synonym Recession once it, too, became a cause of panic.  The beauty of this three-word phrase is that it is too nebulous to ever cause panic. It is also the drumbeat of doom that clever investment banks keep repeating over and over again, in order to lower salary expectations and undermine job security in their rank and file workers. Which is hilarious when you consider that “bad times” is defined as only making 2.1 billion dollars a quarter instead of 2.5 billion.  The phrase is also consistently used as an excuse for unpaid overtime and making employees do three jobs instead of their usual two, in the interests of “meeting the challenges of a changing economy.”    This is a meeting which will never take place in an executive conference room.

 

COMPLIANCE.  Diligently obeying all the laws you’ve paid a fine for breaking in the past.  Corporate compliance says that when your hand has been caught in the cookie jar, you have to be careful around the cookie jar.  The rest of the kitchen is fair game.  This is fine with Federal regulators because — like doctors and healthcare professionals — regulators are only interested in diagnosing the disease after the patient is sick, not preventing the disease from starting in the first place.  So as long as you don’t show any obvious symptoms, a smart corporation can manage to get a clean bill of fiscal health without the annoyance of regulatory check-ups.  Some common examples of compliance outside the investment banking industry can be found in the phrases “My wife’s suspicious; I have to play the good husband,”  “My teacher’s standing right over my shoulder; I can’t cheat on tests anymore,” and “There’s a cop in front of the bank; we can’t rob it.” 

 

DEEP DIVE.   Bullshit backed up by PowerPoint slides.  Ostensibly a presentation which supplies verifiable facts as opposed to the usual bullet points and jargon, a deep dive usually takes place (a) when people start asking intelligent questions that poke holes in the normal day-to-day BS that passes for information; (b) there is a special interpretation of the facts that needs to be understood so that the facts can be ignored; or (c) when an army of facts needs to be deployed to support a particular world view. The implication being that all the information we gave you originally was shallow, if not totally wrong, and this is what you really need to know, honest—until we do a deep dive on the deep dive. (See PRESSURE DIVE.)

DEPRESSION. The “Fire!” that always clears Wall Street’s crowded theatre. A word that is never, ever (ever) spoken aloud when discussing the stock market, which is proof positive of the herd mentality of the industry, as well as the house-of-cards stability of the current market economy, which can be blown over by a single whispered run-on-the-bank-causing stock-price-plummeting three-syllable word.

 

GAAP.  Generally Accepted Accounting Principles, which, as the name suggests, are generally followed.  Not to be confused with GAAL, Generally Acceptable Accounting Loopholes, which are always followed.

 

“I HEAR YOU.”  Shut the fuck up.

MENTORING.  What happens when a man with experience or a high position takes a man with little experience or a lower position under his wing, and guides him through the mine fields of the company’s bureaucracy.  This word is sex-specific.  When a man with experience or a high position takes a woman under his wing at work, this is called HAVING AN AFFAIR.  And when a woman with experience takes another woman under her wing a work, this is called CONSPIRING.

ON BOARD.  Welcome to the Titanic.

ON POINT, STAYING.  Never saying anything that will result in an embarrassing question.

 

SENSITIVITY TRAINING.  “This is the shit that will get us sued.  By saying that out loud, we are now legally covered when you go back to your office and talk to your secretary’s tits.”

 

"THERE’S NO RIGHT OR WRONG HERE."  It’s wrong to the power of ten.

 

TOWN HALL.  A spontaneous departmental gathering during which scripted questions are given prepared answers, and after which profanity will be bleeped out, awkward pauses will be edited away, and Compliance will request a dozen edits of substance to retro-delete the two greatest enemies of Corporate Communications: remarks that are actually honest, and remarks that could lead to lawsuits or criminal charges.  The kind of meeting which, if it took place in Stalinist Russia, would be dismissed as nothing but propaganda; but since it happens in Corporate America, it stands as a prime example of the purest form of employee democracy, where everyone has a voice. Since that voice is always the glorified press releases of Corporate Communications, the “purest form” part of  this definition is (sadly) all-too accurate.

 

URGENCY.  Panic. When someone in management uses the phrase “sense of urgency,” head for the hills and don’t look back. Learn from history—Custer at the Little Big Horn had a sense of urgency. Travis at the Alamo had a sense of urgency. The French at Dien Bien Phu had a sense of urgency. They all soldiered on regardless. Do the same at your own peril.

Copyright 2014 Matthew J Wells

The Big Bad Wolf

 

1.  The Wolf of Wall Street is a three-hour-long master class on how portraying is not dramatizing. 

2.  It is a window into every kind of excess imaginable.  Unfortunately, building a window is carpentry, not storytelling.  And one of the excesses on display is directorial, like Scorsese made it while he was on drugs you and I can't even afford.   

3.  Too bloated to be dramatic, too unfocused to be satire, the movie totally succeeds as a dumb, amoral supposedly-unbiased unreliable-narrator success story in which the main character is adored because he knows how to game the system.

4.  Scorsese’s made this kind of “The main character is a bad guy” film before.  But he’s never done it without a counterweight.  It’s like he said to himself, “I’m going to do Wall Street right—I’m going to portray Gordon Gekko entirely from his point of view, without any of those boring, forgettable subplots about morality and ethics.” Which is like saying “I’m going to do Othello right—I’m going to portray Iago without any of that boring Othello stuff.”

5.  The only counterweight, the only voice against rampant plutocratic excess?  He gets a final scene which serves as an echo to an earlier remark, and you’d expect that it would carry some kind of thematic weight: is it a defeat or a triumph? Watching this moment made me think, “Of course; this has to be here. But what is it saying?  Because it feels like a defeat.  Which means that the world view of the main character that there is no nobility in poverty is justified.  Which is pissing me off right now.”  So if that’s what Scorsese was going for, he succeeded.

6.  Remember the moment when The Departed went off the rails—when the character that Jack Nicholson was playing suddenly became JACK NICHOLSON ON DRUGS AND BOOZE?  This whole movie is kind of like that.
 

7.   This is the most Jack Nicholson performance DiCaprio has ever given.  That is not necessarily a compliment.

8.  This movie takes place in a world where a man can proclaim to a room with women in it that the supreme image of success—driving a high-priced car with a beautiful woman by your side—is totally male, and not one of those women will object to the image.

9.  Sadly, that pretty much sums up Corporate America in a single sentence.

10.  So does the fact that (yes, it's true) every male in Corporate America has been to at least one conference room meeting during which the entire table has chanted the words: "We accept her! We accept her! One of us! One of us! Gooble-gobble, gooble-gobble!"

We've all been there.

11.  If it's the road of excess that leads to the palace of wisdom, Scorsese  makes it a point to park his limo in every rest stop along that road, and linger over the same fast food meal without ever once glancing into the kitchen to see how it’s prepared, before his driver honks the horn and he says "Oh right—I'm on the way to wisdom!" and then gets into the car and cries: "Step on it!  But slow down when we get to the next rest stop!" 

12.  This movie is nothing but selfies.  It’s a three-hour Facebook post with all-caps oversharing.  And just like a Facebook post, it’s designed to make you think you’re missing out on something by not being this cool, this happening, this elite.

13.  This film is to Scorsese what 1941 is to Spielberg.

14.  You will miss out on something very special by not seeing this movie.   That is not necessarily a recommendation. 

 

 

I prefer this kind of bad wolf.


 

Excerpts from the Wishful Thinking Version of the Goldman Sachs Hearings

THE SENATE: The idea that Wall Street came out of this thing just fine, thank you, is just something that just grates on people.
GOLDMAN: Wow. You just said “just” three times in nine words.
THE SENATE: People think you didn’t just come out fine because it was luck. They think you guys just really gamed the system real well. You played both ends against the middle and made a boatload of money. How do you explain that?
GOLDMAN: You show a surprising ignorance about the purpose of investment banking.
THE SENATE: Do you think it’s morally right?
GOLDMAN: Moral, schmoral--it’s legal.
THE SENATE: That doesn’t make it morally right.
GOLDMAN: If you don’t like it, pass a law against it.
THE SENATE: You show a surprising ignorance about the job of a US Senator.

THE SENATE: What would you change in the regulatory system?
GOLDMAN: Clearly some things need to be changed
THE SENATE: Give me an example.
GOLDMAN: Governmental oversight.
CITIBANK & MORGAN STANLEY: Hear hear!

THE SENATE: I’m going to mention the little guys out there on Main Street for about twenty minutes, so if you need to use the bathroom, now’s the time.

THE SENATE: People feel like you are betting with other people’s money and other people’s future. Instead of Wall Street, it looks like Las Vegas.
GOLDMAN: I resent that comparison! We are not a casino! In a casino, the customer occasionally wins!

THE SENATE: I’m trying to home in on why I have so many unemployed people in my state--people who lost money in their pensions.
GOLDMAN: That’s what you get for making stupid investments.

BYSTANDER: How do you live with yourself?
GOLDMAN: I have my administrative assistants do that for me.

THE SENATE: How did you feel when you learned that Goldman employees used the word “shit” to describe the quality of certain Goldman deals?
GOLDMAN: I’m appalled.
THE SENATE: You are appalled that they called them shit?
GOLDMAN: I am appalled that they put it in an e-mail. And doubly appalled that our IT Department didn’t automatically delete them.

THE SENATE: Did you know the housing market was doomed?
GOLDMAN: I think we’re not that smart.
THE SENATE: How smart are you?
GOLDMAN: Your shoe lace is untied.
THE SENATE: Really? [Looks down at shoes.]
GOLDMAN: [snapping The Senate’s nose] Nyah nyah.

THE SENATE: Don’t you think your customers should know what your employees think about the deals they are selling?
GOLDMAN: Don’t you think your constituents should know what their Senator thinks about the bills he is passing?
THE SENATE: Well, when you put it that way, . . .

My other hand just stole your wallet.

THE SENATE: Don’t you feel regret for what you did?
GOLDMAN: Regret to me means something that you feel that you did wrong. Since when should you feel wrong for making money in a capitalist society?

THE SENATE: Do you think that your clients know that what they think is gold, you think is crap?
GOLDMAN: Hove you ever known anyone in sales who didn’t think his product was crap?
THE SENATE: You are making money by selling things and then making money hand over fist by betting that those products will fail!
GOLDMAN: I keep telling you--it’s not betting when you know what the outcome will be. And everything is doomed to fail. Except capitalism.

Just hearing the word "derivatives" puts John McCain to sleep.

If the US Senate Used Truth Serum . . .

. . . we'd probably see a lot more headlines like this:

Somewhere, Howard Zinn is grinning.

In case you missed it? 'Cause, y'know, I did, And it's potentially huge:

Sonia Sotomayor, President Obama’s newly installed Supreme Court Justice, has a few words for corporations seeking protection under law.

You’re not people.

During arguments in a recent campaign-finance case — that may upend campaign finance law to allow more spending by corporations — Sotomayor suggested that the core underpinning of protecting corporations’ rights was flawed.

The Wall Street Journal has the details:

During arguments in a campaign-finance case, the court's majority conservatives seemed persuaded that corporations have broad First Amendment rights and that recent precedents upholding limits on corporate political spending should be overruled.

But Justice Sotomayor suggested the majority might have it all wrong -- and that instead the court should reconsider the 19th century rulings that first afforded corporations the same rights flesh-and-blood people have.

Judges "created corporations as persons, gave birth to corporations as persons," she said. "There could be an argument made that that was the court's error to start with...[imbuing] a creature of state law with human characteristics."

The case she's referring to?

SANTA CLARA COUNTY v. SOUTHERN PAC. R. CO.,
118 U.S. 394 (1886)

in which:

“Supreme Court Justice Morrison Remick Waite simply pronounced before the beginning of argument in the case of Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company that:

“The court does not wish to hear argument on the question whether the provision in the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which forbids a State to deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws, applies to these corporations. We are all of opinion that it does.”

Thus it was that a two-sentence assertion by a single judge elevated corporations to the status of persons under the law.”

Whether or not anything comes of it, it would be nice to see this "assertion" becoming a subject for debate in our current coporatocracy.

How to describe layoffs in LieBanker

In the investment banker (or IBanker) world, where a great deal of effort goes into creating buzzwords and phrases like “leveraging the franchise,” “increasing the footprint,” and “maintaining work-life balance,” an even greater amount of effort goes into creating pleasant synonyms for “We fucked up” and “You are paying for our fuck-up with your job, pal.”

What is not generally known is that these phrases and synonyms are collected and updated in a shared dictionary that is housed on a secure server underneath the Bank of New York building on the corner of Wall Street and Broadway. It was originally called the Gould Standard, after robber-baron Jay Gould, who started gathering current Wall Street slang after he won control of Western Union in the late 1800’s. It is currently known simply as the LieBanker.

The 2008 version of the LieBanker mandates that any corporate discussion of billion-dollar write-downs, massive losses due to risky portfolio positions, and personal responsibility for stupid investment mistakes should all be described by the phrase “turbulent market conditions” or "current corporate environment." It also requires that, in every meeting or discussion of these conditions, the following quote from Charles Darwin should be prominently displayed:

“It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.”
(The number of false assumptions contained in that single sentence are staggering, and deserve a separate post; for the moment let me just say that an investment banker who is actually responsive to change is like a mountain which is actually responsive to erosion –- the effects are visible only after eons, not e-mails.)

The following synonyms for “You are paying for our fuck-up with your job, pal,” are taken from the 05-15-08 LieBanker, which has not been updated since that date because the analyst in charge of it was from Bear Stearns:

Bobbit. A particularly emasculating form of severance; as in, "Did you hear what happened to Brian? It was a real Bobbit."

Boned. To have all the personnel and consultant fat removed from your group or department by those butchers in Human Resources; as in, “Oh man, we got boned in the last RIF.”

BS. A layoff which occurs because it will make the next quarter's balance sheet numbers look good. A BS always affects actual employees, not consultants.

Cap-sized. To have your numbers reduced based on budget restrictions and not performance. Departments that have been cap-sized usually end up life-boated (qv).

De-mailed. To have your absence in the company discovered only when someone realizes you are no longer in the e-mail directory; as in, “Oh my God -- Sharon Radulov just got de-mailed.”

Foxed. To be walked out of your office by security after getting boned. From Bud Fox, the character played by Charlie Sheen in Wall Street.

Life-boated. What happens when the survivors of a cap-size are assigned to different departments.

RIF. Reduction in Force. Not to be confused with ROF, which stands for Retention Of Fuckers, the worst of whom always seem to survive layoffs with their jobs and attitudes intact.

Right-size. The kinder gentler way of saying “down-size,” which is the kinder gentler way of saying “laid off,” which is the kinder gentler way of saying “fired.” Right-sizing means there was something wrong with having all those people doing one job apiece, and therefore something right about a smaller amount of people doing three jobs apiece. It also implies that the kinder gentler event which has just taken place is really just another example of the most overused word in LieBanker: a correction.

Tipped. To be pushed onto the life side of work-life balance.

Unpersonnel. Former high-level company officers who have to be edited out of all corporate historical records; as in, "Zoe Cruz has to be taken out of that video--she's an unpersonnel."

Wrapping. A large severance package; as in, "He's gone, but they gave him a lot of wrapping, so he should be okay for the next few months."

Z-sponsible. Used to describe the person least responsible for a multi-billion-dollar mistake, who then takes the fall for the person actually responsible. The rules of corporate z-sponsibility require that any mistake resulting in massive write-offs can only be rectified by de-mailing as many people as possible at the bottom of the payroll pyramid.

Call Security!

Thanks to the firewall at my day job, I am no longer able to post during working hours. Or comment on anyone else's blog. Or even see comments. Because, y'know, doing that instead of reading the Wall Street Journal online might do more damage to them than the sub-prime mortgage loan crisis.

I'm not surprised. This is, after all, a company which blocks me from reading The Nation online. (No joke.)

So what does this mean? More posts in the evening and the weekends. And tons o' fodder for a play or a novel.