Why does Management use excessive acronyms ?

Question

I have helluve time understanding what the associates are up to. When you ask them to explain, they say they too, do not know what the acronym stands for but know what needs to be done.

What is the point of using acronyms if we can hardly understand what they are trying to say ?
Are they power word crazy or just plain lazy to say it in full ?

Answer 1

I don't think laziness motivates people use acronyms. There is nothing lazy about saying "TV" instead of "television." Acronyms are simply a natural progression of our technologically rich language.

It is not uncommon for people to use acronyms without knowing exactly what the letters stand for. Laser (http://www.acronymfinder.com/acronym.aspx?rec={93764C24-89E8-11D4-8351-00C04FC2C2BF}) and Scuba (http://www.acronymfinder.com/acronym.aspx?rec={940EEA82-89E8-11D4-8351-00C04FC2C2BF}) are examples of words many people don't even know were derived from acronyms. In the situation you described, it may be that acronyms in common use in your business are also evolving into words in their own right.

The good news is, if a person using an acronym can't or won't explain it to your satisfaction, you can probably find it on Acronym Finder.

Answer 2

On one hand, an acronym is just a symbol a representational token for a concept or quantity; Since all concepts are symbolic in nature, representations for these concepts are simply token artifacts that are allegorical to (but do not directly codify) a symbolic meaning.

On the other hand, acronyms are often like buzz words. people use when when they really don't understand the concepts.

Answer 3

Management is an ancient discipline. People have been managers and been managed since time immemorial. It took managers and management to build the Pyramids. The wonders of Florence or St Paul’s would not have come into being without management. People, however, did not call themselves “managers”.

While people have been practising management for centuries, theorizing about it is an invention of the twentieth century. The new profession of management has brought with it not only techniques and theories but a new language.

Read any management article, everything from the Harvard Business Review to the business section of the newspaper and the language of management jumps out. It is often not a pretty sight and even worse when you hear it.

From the connoisseur of English language, managers speak and write in an incomprehensible argot peppered with bastardizations and abbreviations. They elevate civil servants and tongue-tied politicians to masters of pithiness and clarity.

Management speak seeks to save time:
Managers trying to cram as many meetings into a day. Time is crucial; lyrical phraseology is not. Management-speak is full of abrupt and evil sounding abbreviations. The trouble is they often produce blank looks of incomprehension.

Even the definition of management involves an acronym:
Sounding like an obscure Polish town, “POSA-CORB” unpronounceably defines management as Planning, Organizing, Staffing directing, Coordinating, Reporting and Budgeting.

Contemporary triumph of management language is the eponymous phrase “Hands-on”:
Managers worldwide claim to be “hands-on”. It sounds like an earth-shattering experience. Perhaps for some it is.

In practice, however, it means managers who have some inkling of what goes on in the world beyond their lush carpeted offices. On the otherhand, managers can be “hands-off”. They simply delegate to their heart’s content and let everyone else get on with it. It converts idleness to a business strategy.

Strategy, a very useful word:
It was perhaps one of the great discoveries of the 1960s. While the rest of the world discovered Jimi Hendric, managers came upon “strategy” that remains the Holy Grail of management-speak. It works simply:

If a decision is made on the spur of the moment or reached while playing gold it quickly becomes a “strategy”, one of a series of decisions primed on achieving a cunningly conceived goal. Almost any decision can become a strategy.

If a whisky distiller buys a bus company, it immediately becomes an integral part of a Strategy, no matter how foolhardy an investment.

“Focus” comes closest next to none other:
Companies like to be “focused”. If they have companies which make tropical fish food, engineering parts and talcum powder, they will say that they are “focused”.

The trick of being focused is simple: if you do not tell people what you are actually focused on they will keep an eye on your movements suspecting a superbly Machiavellian plan.

Excellence:
Recent years have seen the management vocabulary expand rapidly. A host of management best-sellers have all brought with them their own dialects.

Tom Peters introduced “excellence” into the management vocabulary. It is, as everyone agrees, a good idea. Given the choice, everyone would prefer to work for an “excellent” company doing whatever excellent companies do.

The people who have bought Peters’ book quickly added a few new phrases to enliven meetings and uninspired afternoons on training courses. They talk of “sticking to the knitting”, doing what you are god at, and “beer busts”, encouraging teamwork by buying everyone a beer on a Friday night.

A sprinkling of the following could not hurt either:

SWOT analysis:
Management-speak is in a continual state of flux. Managers are very faddish creatures, anxiously devouring the latest success story or guide book to making a million. In the 1960s they consumed weighty tomes on strategy and championed the idea of “SWOT” analysis. Many meetings later, the came upon “Quality” and decided it was the answer to the world’s problems.

TQM:
Quality, a word which can be used interchangeably with excellence, brought with it a steady supply of acronyms.

Today TQM, Total Quality Management and JIT, Just in Time, are readily understood by most managers. TQM is particularly reassuring. Knowledge of it implies that you, too, are a Total Quality Manager, even if you have only been on a one day course three years ago.

JIT:
JIT is also a popularly bandied term at opportune moments. It is easily explained. If a manufacturing plant is down to its last consignment of specially made Bulgarian imports only available from a small shop in a village outside of Sofia, just as the last one is used, a lorry turns the corner with the next consignment, the factory is operating a sophisticated JIT system. Of late, Six Sigma is the watch word from Motorola.

People orientated company:
Management’s mastery of language really comes into its own when they compose annual reports, their chance to get important messages across to shareholders, employees, financial experts and the public.

It is common for chairmen to open up reports with the news that they are in a “people business.” This sounds caring but amounts to very little; unless robots are employed it is difficult not to be in a people business.

Fight the good fight ?

“Challenging” is another popular watch word of annual reports. It is a euphemism for difficult, if not impossible.

If conditions in a company’s markets are said to be “challenging”, it is likely to mean that the company found it almost impossible to sell a single product.

Challenging sounds brave and forthright: managers standing indomitable, seeing the company through hard times.

If managers forecast a “challenging year ahead”, what they are really saying is that they have no idea what might happen.

Encouraging results:
The word “encouraging” is also twisted ever so slightly from its literal meaning. In an annual report it is liable to mean “surprisingly, losses were not as large as last year.”

“Consistent with” is multipurpose in application at virtually any juncture. It gives the impression of rational minds guiding the company down a carefully plotted path. Regardless the case, the shareholders and employees may never know.

In reality managers can do and justify anything with management speak; laypersons need interpreters.