The Devil's Dictionary

How management jargon captures your mind

At the risk of being obscene I would like to talk about work. Why is it so dreadful today? It is a perennial trope that we do what we must in order to pay the bills, but it has not escaped my attention that this necessary duty comes with terms and conditions increasingly conducive to misery. Why is this the case?

In case you haven’t noticed yet everything is management. This claim can be proven by what I call the acronym test. Wherever you find unexplained clumps of letters you will also find jargon, which is the product of the modern idea of professionalism.

This professionalism is new. It has nothing to do with the old one, which meant something like ‘being able to do your job on your own’. Professionalism is the command and control of consensus through code words. It obscures the obvious and prefers policy to practice. Its goal is to replace the difficult and challenging world of things with an easily manipulated word map. This results in a parallel perception of reality.