Goodcopybadycopy: 'Scenes from corporate life'

Being interested in language and working for a large company, I find it easy to relate to the 'Scenes from corporate life' cartoons that appear weekly on the goodcopybadcopy blog.

This one is my current favourite:





Goodcopybadcopy: Cartoons

Onward communicate

From a corporate email I received recently:

Please feel free to onward communicate to your teams.

I'm not sure what I like less - the verb 'onward communicate' or the lack of subject (onward communicate what?).

Googling "onward communicate" only gives 61 results so perhaps it won't catch on.

Australian business-speak

It looks like business-speak isn't limited to the US and the UK: Roz has written in with some examples heard during a one-hour 'Dialogue Day' session at the Australian Taxation Office. Here they are, with Roz's comments in brackets.

• Key drivers

• Key deliverables

• Key strategies (why can't they use some synonyms for 'key'?)
  

• ...sessions around delivery plans (whatever happened to 'about' or 'regarding' or 'concerning'?)

• At the end of the day

• Cascade down corporate messages (well, cascades don't often go up do they?)

• Efficiencies made to business (how do you 'make' an efficiency?)

• Big ticket item

• Co-design session

• Impacting on all the messages out there

• Hip pocket

• Value-adding

• A deliberate service model (what – as opposed to an accidental one?)

• Sophisticated profiling and risk

• Level playing field

• The tax agent community (yeah, there's probably an axe-murdering community too. Everything has a community these days)

• Principles-based

• Penalty 'safe-harbour'

• Grass-roots issues

• Base tenants (I think the $120,000-per-year idiot meant tenets)

• Capability-building projects

Thanks for those, Roz. 'Level playing field' is one that often appears in our publication; we hear all sorts of gubbins about 'communities'; and 'impacting' is one of my personal bugbears. So I feel your pain...