For those of you uninitiated with the Sesame Street program, my condolences, you missed on some good ‘childhood’ (notice the quotes…it is a commodity these days). Anyway, Sesame Street had this section where they would have ‘letter of the day’. So if the letter of the day was ….’R’, they’d showcase a whole bunch of tunes and pictures around the letter R…Raccoon, Rabies, Retarded, Rottweiler, Roasted Chicken, Romans, ….or if it were the letter ‘S’, they’d cover ship, sheep, sister, soap, silicon, Pamela Anderson…and …well you get the picture!
I recently read one of the blogs where the writer said that there was a way HR in IT companies could offload their training costs to parents. Teach the kids at home about HR policy, especially considering the fact that almost every college graduate is going to sell their soul to an IT company, why not catch them young? Install swipe cards at home, have a instant coffee machine, casual Friday’s, penalties for coming late to dinner, over promise on number of chocolates to be given and club most of it into the ‘performance bonus’ which is never seen by the kid, and so on.
We can take this a step further and tailor make Sesame Street like programs to teach kids jargon. This brilliant plan came to me when I received a whole bunch of emails from the boss, which dropped a whole bunch of words on me which made no sense. Words like ‘technology cut’, ‘value delivered services’,’ self-realized solutions’, ’solution storyline’…and a whole bunch of such words. And this just isn’t from the boss but a whole bunch of people. It is already painful enough that the MBA grads can only use jargon to show off their degrees (I think this is an inferiority complex issue because the world refuses to accept us in the same league as doctors or lawyers).
Everyday is a god damn ‘jargon’ fest. IT MBA grad rule number 1 “Thou shalt use heavy duty words that really don’t mean anything but are trying to capture what you think you want to say and are hoping that if the minions or equals do not understand it, they will deem you as a superior being. If you cannot convince them, confuse them. And if you can’t do that either, become a private consultant”. It is so annoying; all we do is drop words. So why can’t we teach the next gen all those words. In any case kids don’t understand most of the words they use, so why not acclimatize them to their dron- like future in an IT company.
Kid in class 2 is giving a speech about his family – I live in a collaborative family where every unit while behaving in a silo-like fashion are all bringing some value add to the table, except for my 5-month old baby brother who is somewhat a half baked potato and hence cannot replace the incumbent need to bring value into the family. My father is the primary revenue generating SBU , who is supported by my mother from an on-site model. Mother is the key driver and champion with regard to the nutritional needs of the family unit. My elder sister is a drain on our revenues from her off-shore location in the US, as most of the opex is spent on her collaborative needs with her boyfriend and her opex needs to follow the accepted Gartner model of buying clothes and make up which involves assess->prioritize->procure->refresh cycle which is a market accepted model. I however am a hot potato and am showing great potential to drive new expense models. I believe an initial investment is being made to ensure that I too proactively become part of the revenue model of the family unit.
I am now planning to request HR to include a daily mailer which goes out “Jargon of the day”, and the winner would be one who can use the word (appropriately or inappropriately) during the course of the day. They would be given a taxable cash prize of Rs.500 which would be given upon completion of 5 years of service with the company. Please note, the winner who wins more than 3 times is now the “Jargon Champion” and will be felicitated in the cafeteria with a free meal upon completion of 7 years of continuous service. (PS: Now I am thinking like HR too….muhahahaha…. murder by clauses and sub-clauses).
Today’s word for the day – Competency-based Advantage.
Heard around the office, “ My wife really must not attempt to cook idli, it is not part of the Competency-based Advantage cooking skill she has”
“ I really like that babe in the other department, but I don’t have a Competency-based Advantage over that moron she is going around with in her department.”
“ I’d like to review these presentations to determine our Competency-based Advantage.”
“ There remains a Competency-based Advantage for me looking at our strategic based alliance going forward.”
And heard by the new recruits in the engineering department, “ Machaan…..that marketing fellow who graduated from our college is using this word - Competency-based Advantage. Must be some big thinking shit da…we’ll also use of. Then we’ll also get a promotion” “Dai….you know what it means?” “Machaan…..they were using in that presentation thing….it must be something big…don’t think too much…just use it”
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