big business

By Christa 1 August, 2007 random

The magazine I work for was owned by a big company, part of a huge collection of magazines labeled “enthusiast media”. A few months ago, my company sold off these enthusiast magazines to another huge company. And today, apparently, the acquisition has been officially completed. We all received an email from the new chairman letting us know. I don’t think I’m really allowed to post that email in its entirety, but I wish I could, because it’s hilarious. I think the person who wrote the email took a bunch of regular, normal words, like “hi, this is your boss! shape up or ship out! Lots of things are going to change! Watch out!” and replaced them with a bunch of words from some sort of business doublespeak thesaurus.

To avoid any possible trouble, I’ll just list my two favorite lines from the email:

“We do expect to generate synergies as we unite the businesses.” In other words: expect some of you to lose your jobs in the corporate structure (like HR, finance, legal, etc. We’re all safe here at the magazine).

“I want to let you know that leadership is committed to ensuring that change at our Company will be purposeful and value-driven.” we’re not gonna stop being cheap! that’s our #1 goal!

two of the saddest business words in all of history: synergy and value-driven.

4 thoughts on “big business”

  1. Tiffany

    Does this mean that you might possibly be fired and have to move back to AZ???? I know it’s wrong to hope for something like that, but still…

  2. Jonathan

    The hyphen doesn’t make “value-driven” one word, so I think you’re talking about three of the saddest business words in all of history. But don’t forget “right sizing,” which is the saddest word of all. It replaced “down sizing”, although the only companies to ever use “right sizing” are going “down” in terms of number of employees. No one decides the “right size” would be MORE employees. And even down-sizing was a euphamism for layoffs. Which is, itself, a euphamism for firing people. We’re not firing people, we’re having layoffs. I mean, that is to say, we’re downsizing. No, wait, what I meant was we’re right-sizing. Yeah, that’s it. Right sizing.