The New Businessman's Lexicon

HUMAN kind cannot bear very much reality," wrote T.S. Eliot, and few businessmen would disagree. Since appearances are important in business as elsewhere, executives are quick to wrap their troubles in euphemisms, or at least camouflage them in obfuscating language. Many companies have been uncommonly troubled by the recent recession, which some experts prefer to call a "recedence" or "retardation," and by new attacks on industry's social conscience. One consequence is that the linguistic fog has begun to thicken in annual reports, executives' speeches and other official statements. A sampler:

A competitive year: Sales are down.

Operations audits: Cost chopping, often including mass firings.

Restructuring the organization:

Hacking the dead wood in the executive suite.

Undergoing a career adjustment:

The condition of an executive who has just been fired, which is often referred to as "dehired" or "outplaced."

Plotting a career strategy: An unemployed executive's efforts to find a new job.

Management consultant: A pursuit often followed by career-adjusted executives whose career strategy has collapsed.

Commitment to socially desirable objectives: A vow taken by company officials after losing a series of consumer suits or paying fines for polluting, or both.

Multimarket, mass-consumer, technologically-oriented, unified-manage-ment company: A conglomerate.

Decentralizing the organization:

The trustbusters threaten to step in.

Programmed power shedding: The electricity will be cut off.

Department of special markets:

The office headed by the firm's showcase black executive, who is occasionally asked for advice on selling to other blacks.

Demographic skew: A goof by the market researchers that makes a new product all but unsalable.

Major-leverage impact: The profit to be made from a project, an estimate usually accompanied by a number of "results-oriented hypotheses" to prove that the idea is "viable."

Suboptimal cost profile: The project costs too much. At this point the plan has reached a "mature configuration" and is dropped.

Price adjustments: Inflation.

Profit taking: A wave of selling in the stock market is driving share prices down.

Abiding faith in American youth:

Sooner or later they will come to their senses.

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