Month: August 2010

I have a love/hate relationship with bizspeak. I’m fascinated by the way phrases enter our lexicon, become popular, then die off. But I also get annoyed by hackneyed writing and lazy speech. Smart people usually fall back on cliches because they don’t have time to think of an original way to illustrate an idea, and that’s understandable.

Still, it sets my teeth on edge when I hear something like, “We’ll start at the 50,000 foot level, then do a core dump and a deep dive and brainstorm some value-add strategies to open the kimono.” David Meerman Scott does a great job skewering the phenomenon in his Gobbledygook Manifesto.

When I worked at Nortel, back in the late 20th century, there was a phrase in vogue that got used so confusingly that I’m convinced most people didn’t know what it meant. The phrase was sometimes rendered as “moving the goal posts” and sometimes as “moving the yard sticks.” Sometimes people said “moving the yard sticks” to indicate progress, as the ball moves forward on a football field. Others used “moving the goal posts” to mean the target had shifted after the project was underway.

Others used them interchangeably, or incorrectly, so that whenever anyone used either phrase, you had to stop and wonder if they meant it was a good thing or a bad thing.

The phrase I’m hearing a lot these days is “move the needle,” as in “do something to create a measurable impact.” Not too bad, all things considered. But let’s hop on it before we get sick of it. Can we come up with another phrase that will mean the same thing?

Here are some suggestions:

1. Stuff the turkey
2. Butter the muffin
3. Inflate the balloon
4. Squeeze the turnip
5. Grate the cheese
6. Raise the barn
7. Float the armada
8. Pickle the okra

Your ideas? We’ll decide on it, then start using it. We won’t tell anyone. We’ll see if other people start using it. It’ll be our secret.

photo by Amarillo Chuck

The Mrs and The Boy and I went for a walk this morning and at some point along the route, I got to thinking about what I would do in the afternoon while he was napping. “Weekends, as you know if you’re a parent, are built around his sleep schedule.” For some reason I also started thinking about what I would do if I didn’t have to go to work tomorrow. What would I do if I woke up rich?

I don’t mean what I would buy first, or what beach I would jet off to. I mean how would I spend my days if I didn’t need to worry about a paycheck?

That’s not a challenge I’ve faced before, but I did have one stretch, post-Nortel layoff, when I didn’t have a job to go to. In addition to sending out resumes, I spent a lot of time writing in the blog that eventually subsumed into this one “check the archives” and learning more about digital photography and photo editing. I went to Iceland and wrote the daily blog for the Iceland Airwaves music festival and created a “now defunct” Geocities site about the trip, Icelandic culture and music. I also did some volunteer work for the Durham Crisis Response Center and the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation.

I’m lucky enough that my career gives me the chance to do similar things for my work. But lucky is a relative term, because I probably wouldn’t have ended up where I am in my career if I hadn’t learned some of those things on my own.

So I do know what I would do if I woke up rich and didn’t have to work. In addition to traveling more, I’d keep on learning new stuff, developing my creative outlets and offering my assistance and expertise to organizations I believe in.

But here’s the cool thing that occurred to me: Basically, I didn’t need to be rich to do those things. I had more time than usual, since I was unemployed, but even if I’d had a job I could have done some or all of them.

What would you do if you woke up rich? If you can answer that question, it could help you figure out what you most want to be doing in life, and what you want to be doing for a living.

And if you go out and start doing it, maybe someone will eventually pay you to do it.

photo by kevindooley