Tag: managementspeak

#oneaday Day 400: I can't do LinkedIn

After closing my original account a few years back — I'd never used it, I'd never got a job using it and I didn't see the value in it — I opened a new LinkedIn account a few weeks back. I still absolutely hate it.

Not only is its interface second only to Facebook in terms of general clutter, user unfriendliness and AI being rammed in your face everywhere, but the general tone of everyone on there is just insufferable. Every post is some great life lesson that they've learned from their time in business to business sales; every little happening at work is cause for twelve paragraphs of pontificating; every opportunity to brag about how you absolutely are not a "low performer" or similar is taken, and festooned with emoji.

I cannot imagine ever thinking at any point "I know, I think I'll check LinkedIn, that sounds like a fun use of my time". The fact the thing constantly emails me to let me know I have "1 new message" when all it is is some spam ad in my message inbox pisses me off. The fact it emails me to tell me I have "new notifications" when it's people I don't know starting jobs at companies I've never heard of pisses me off.

In short, I don't really know why I opened an account there again. I guess I was just curious to see if it was in any way "useful" for "networking", as some people like to say. And perhaps it is useful for that, if you're the insufferable business-speak type. But that is emphatically not me. I struggle to take posts even from people I know seriously, and I fear that if I spent any protracted amount of time on the platform, I would almost certainly tell at least one person (no-one specific) to stop being so up their own arse, and if they really think they have something worthwhile to say about "the world of work", as our careers advisors at school used to call it, perhaps they should try writing a self-help book that management consultants can put on their shelves and never read rather than inflicting their bilge on the broader Internet community.

I can't do it. I struggle with social media at the best of times these days, but the fact it's pretty much the only way to get in touch with some people really rankles me. I miss the good old days of email chains where people put time and effort into the messages they sent one another; late-night chats on MSN Messenger and AOL Instant Messenger; hell, even text messages felt more personal than what we have today.

It's one of the many ways I feel completely and utterly left behind by the world as it exists today, and I absolutely hate it. So don't expect to see any activity from me on LinkedIn any time soon. I can think of very few worse ways to spend my time.

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#oneaday, Day 58: Bullshit Bingo

The school I work at (until this coming Friday, fact fans) recently had its updated OfSTED report published. For the uninitiated (and/or American) amongst you, this is the report on how "good" (sarcastic air quotes mine, not theirs) the school is. At the last inspection, shortly before I arrived at the school in November, the school was judged to be "inadequate" and in need of "special measures" for various reasons that I won't bore you with now. The most recent report claimed that we were making "satisfactory" progress towards making the "required improvements" put forth in the "action plan".

The crowning glory of the report, though, was the phrase "stem the tide of falling underachievement", something which apparently we are doing. Now, I don't know quite how many negatives are in that statement but I'm sure there's the wrong number. Surely "falling underachievement" is a good thing, so you wouldn't want to "stem the tide" of it? Perhaps they meant "stem the tide of falling achievement", but that doesn't sound quite right either. And I'm pretty sure it's not "stem the tide of achievement", since that is how the school got into this mess in the first place, albeit not intentionally.

There's only one response to things like this: "BULLSHIT!"

It astonishes me quite how much people get away with peddling this nonsensical use of language under the pretence of it being "formal". Those of you who follow me on Twitter may remember what I did to the company that supposedly "manages" the estate of apartment blocks that I live on. I went through their letter and corrected it in red pen, then posted it back to them. The results are here, if you missed it first time:

I think I was quite generous with a D-.

Then, of course, you get anyone who talks about social media "professionally", or at least likes to think they do. They use words like "monetization strategy" and "leverage" to mean "how they are going to make money" and "use". What is wrong with "how they make money" and "use"? We've been using language like that for years. Why does the technological age suddenly have to bring in a bunch of new and meaningless jargon? And, while we're on, since when did the word "product" – without a trailing "s" – become a plural?

Politics are no better. Listen to our less-than-illustrious boring fart of a leader Gordon Brown speak and all you'll hear is string after string of meaningless waffle – so utterly devoid of actual content that by the time he reaches the end of his speech you've completely forgotten what the question was and you'll agree with him just to shut him up. The Tories aren't any better. Listen to Cameron in all his shiny-headed glory and all you get is repetitive catchphrases, empty promises and a slightly larger urge to slit your wrists than when you started. If I had to pick one of them to listen to, I'd pick Cameron, but it's a close-run thing, and with either of them I'd be chewing down on the cyanide capsules if I didn't have other things to distract me with.

I like plain speaking. The last few jobs I've applied for I've taken this approach and communicated with the potential employers or clients as an actual human being. I'm not "passionate" about things that I'm not really passionate about. I'm not "confident and enthusiastic". I'm not "a team player". I'm not… you know, all the other idiotic things that people only ever write when applying for a job and eventually get found out as being a liar. I'm Pete. I'm a human. I speak English. I don't speak jargon.