Michelle Rodger: I'm struggling to take on board this feeling of deja moo

OKAY people, listen up, I've got you all on my radar. Blue sky thinking, brainstorming and thinking outside the box have all circled the drain. Going forward in this space, we need to take an ideas shower and develop a holistic cradle-to-grave approach to the emerging paradigm.

I know the strategic staircase is long and steep but if we drill down and granularise our core competencies we can shorten the path to profitability.

We need to be more proactive to redress the recent shortfall in compliance so I need 110% support to put all my ducks in a row and avoid negative territory. This month's retail sales are up, but we can't sit back on our laurels and guarantee ongoing multiple store-gasms, we need to gather the low-hanging fruit before the competition.

Let's face it, none of us is trying to reinvent the wheel, but there are no quick wins. Let's connect ear-to-ear tomorrow to discuss how we can leverage our synergies in a real-time customisable platform.

Oooooh. Do you speak Crocachit? For those of you not yet fully versed in management speak, I'll translate: "We need to work hard, together, to make fewer mistakes and more money." Plain English? It's not rocket science.

In case you were in any way confused, let me disambiguate for you: I abhor management speak. It started as a personal quest against the use of "over" instead of "more than" (as in "over a million pounds has been spent to date with no tangible ROI" since "over" relates purely to height, not volume), and active instead of proactive but I now find myself railing daily against the stealth emergence of management jargon.

If managers are not forgetting the need for line of sight, horizon scanning, keeping things on my/your radar and ensuring mission critical goal congruence, they are getting up to speed, taking things offline or on board, and "verbing" all sorts of inappropriate words; efforting, actioning, calendarising, productivising.

I've discovered "deja moo" (the feeling you've heard this bull before) and "deja poo" (the feeling you've stepped in this bull before). I now understand DBT, which means death by tweakage, as in "why did the project fail?" "It had the DBTs".

I wholeheartedly agree with the derogatory term management insultancy, which is when management hires a team of outside consultants to do what it should be doing – running the company. And while I seriously dislike having to do so, I'm gradually getting to grips with the double meanings of myriad different phrases I hear every day. For example, "I'll take that on board" means "No". "You need to come to my party" isn't a polite invitation to an 80s-themed knees-up, it means simply "Do it my way". "I need to get up to speed" means "I don't know anything" and "Let's take this offline," means neither of us knows anything.

Valleyofthegeeks.com has listed some favourite interpretations of every day management phraseology. We're totally committed to training and education... you'll learn on the spot or we'll fire you. I don't want to point fingers... but you definitely screwed up. There's a significant upside in revenues... we haven't sold anything yet. We're at least 24 months ahead of the competition... and at most six months from bankruptcy. We need to push the envelope on this one... and if you get caught, I will deny all knowledge.

I stumbled across a Random Management Statement Generator on the web – it's hilarious – which links all sorts of management-type words together to come up with what, surprisingly, appears to be exactly the sort of utterance you could expect to hear in a corporate environment.

Would you be fooled into thinking it was for real if you heard: "We need to streamline interactive action-items"? Or "We need to repurpose integrated partnerships" or even "We need to target mission-critical productivity"? Picture Ricky Gervais in Office mode and I'm sure you'll see from where I'm coming.

My favourite so far is the Salmon Day, I'm sure we've all had one, which is the rhetorical experience of spending an entire day swimming upstream only to get screwed and fail in the end. Not to be confused with a Salmond Day, which is, well, not that different, I suppose, depending upon which side of the fence your loyalties lie.

I discluded lots of buzz words from this column, for fear of anticipointing my readers (that's giving you the feeling I haven't lived up to my own hype), but after throwing lots of ideas into the proverbial wok to see if I could make myself a stir fry, I got indigestion and gave up.

Ultimately, the only people fooled by management and marketing speak are the managers and marketers themselves. It's not big and it's not clever. At the end of the day employees and customers can see quite clearly through the entire BS cascading down an organisation.

The English language is fit-for-purpose as it is, and surely doesn't need to be Americanised, reverbiagized (that's rewording something with the hope of changing the minds of the people who didn't like it first time around, in case you didn't know) or synergised. As the 18th century theologian and author of a seminal work on English grammar, Joseph Priestly, once said: "The more elaborate our means of communication, the less we communicate."

I must confess that by the end of my research, I felt somehow I had succumbed to the dopelar effect, the tendency of stupid ideas and phrases to seem smarter when they come at you rapidly.

Forgive me: having avoided an attack of the DBTs on my column I suddenly feel the need to go for a sanity check before I re-engineer my frictionless synergies using whiteboard bleeding-edge mindshare techniques.