Category: Musings

The Secret Behind Impressive Corporate Language

Where do the heavy-sounding corporate statements come from?

Corporate Bullshit Image 1

You may have often marveled at the corporate leaders’ ability to spew wise-sounding, inspiring statements in presentations and speeches, and wondered how they can construct such sentences with heavy-sounding words, effortlessly.

Well, wonder no more, because the secret is out! They get their phrases and sentences from websites that generate such statements on demand. In the next meeting, you too can go armed with your set of phrases, and insert them at an appropriate point to impress everyone.

Here are some websites that generate corporate (bs) statements on demand:

Corporate to spiritual

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Future Moves of Low Cost Airlines?

CheapAir-1
People who regularly travel by air are well aware of the strategies adopted by low-cost airlines (we shall refer to these airlines as ‘CheapAir’ in this article). Some things that they already do, allegedly to compensate for their cheap base tickets are:

  • Charging for food/ drinks in the flight
  • Express check-in queues where you pay extra for faster check-in (last time I managed to complete the check-in faster than those who paid the extra amount – I smirked a ‘bye, take your time’ to the folks in the express queue 😉 ).
  • Special, variable charges for many of the seats – seats in front, aisle seats, window seats, emergency row, etc.
  • Lowering the limits of free baggage and being strict about charging for excess baggage
  • Reducing the weight carried by the aircraft to reduce the fuel consumption by:
    • Getting rid of ovens from the aircraft (no warm meals)
    • Making seats lighter (and making them thinner to accommodate 1-2 rows more)
    • Hiring crew with small build (I have also noticed on one of the CheapAirs in India that all cabin crew members are always of one gender – I am not sure whether this is discrimination)

More than a strategy to recover some money, I think it is a strategy to project themselves as really cheap (low-cost or budget), so that the travelers do not critically look at the ticket prices (which are sometimes higher than the ticket prices on ‘full-service’ airlines).

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Cartoon: The ‘Missed-Call’ Mode of Communication

Missed-Call Cartoon

Increasingly, ‘missed-call’, or ‘miss-call’, or ‘miskol’ (Philippine lingo) is being used as a means of communication, not just by individuals, but also by organizations, who openly ask their customers to ‘give a missed-call.’

I did find it difficult to explain the concept of ‘missed-call’ to a friend from a Western country. His question was “How can I give you a missed call? If you don’t pick it up, you miss the call. The caller cannot control whether it is a missed call or not – only the receiver can make it a missed call or picked call.”

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CIA-OSS Manual for Workplace Sabotage

Recently, the CIA declassified a document titled ‘Simple Sabotage Field Manual’. This manual was created by the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the World War II–era precursor to the CIA. It is dated 1944, for use by CIA operatives in Europe who were trying to recruit civilians living in countries occupied by the Axis Alliance (Germany, Italy and Japan).

A scanned version of the document is available in the pdf form at the CIA’s website, here.

OSS-CIA Manual Cover

The documents has around 32 pages. The most interesting parts for me were in the last few pages in a section titled ‘General Interference with Organizations and Production.’

One sub-section of this part is reproduced here:

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