On Monday I am supposed to be attending a “mandatory” set of workshops on my institution’s performance management process. It runs from 8:30 until 4:45. If this wasn’t intrusive enough on printing out the workshop notes just now I was not highly encouraged by the opening slide:
“Performance Management is managing the performance of the organisation”
I am not keen to read further but think I will have to – just so the inanity of it doesn’t catch me by surprise on Monday.
It could be worse! I’d expect something like that to be written entirely in nominalisations and passive voice: “Performance management is the management of the performance of the organisation.”
At least there’s an active verb in there.
very good point! I didn’t think of that. That gives me something to amuse myself with during the sessions as well…perhaps i might keep a little tally for my own entertainment
You could try Buzzword Bingo. If the person who wrote that piece is facilitating the seminar, they’re bound to talk about “low-hanging fruit” and “pushing the envelope” and “windows of opportunity.”
oooh…I love a good “window of opportunity”….actually during an unsatisfactory meeting last week regarding a “restructure” I started tallying the number of times we were instructed to provide our “feedback in writing”….although once I got to twenty I did give up!
I do, in a lecture on cliches, suggest that the window of opportunity should be thrown out of itself, but it’s a joke I inherited from the previous lecturer. I can live with the window of opportunity, but I will scream if I hear one more person talk about how achieving their goal (no matter how impressive) has been a “journey.”
ha…that’s funny!
The journey…I could tell you about a certain university preparatory program that explicitly structures its students’ educational transformations through the motif of a “hero’s journey”…but I don’t think I will…because a lot of the time I find it to be a structural artifice which is superfluous for students being able to understand the process of their learning.
Oooh, not just a journey, but my other least favourite cliche, as well.
Honestly, everyone’s a hero, these days. (Either a hero or a survivor.) I think that’s a bit rough on the people who actually are heroic.
yes…they are totally over used!
actually this reminds of a quote from roy and hg’s the dream from the sydney olympics where they said the same thing in describing their own comedy…words like “tilt” and “hero” and many others from their particular sporting discourse…as they explained “we’re trying to devalue these words of all meaning by using them all the time” or something like that…