As I sat through yet another PowerPoint presentation in yet another meeting delivered with yet a further string of incomprehensible English this week, my thoughts turned to how able, articulate and intelligent people can so mangle words and language as to destroy all meaning and commonsense.

I have glazed over as I listened to yet more laser focus, drilling down, enhancing of client alignment, leveraging of assets and other gobbledegook. Government departments now have “stakeholder engagement officers”. Once upon a time, people just told other people what they were doing and how they were doing it directly, without the need for intermediaries to confuse the message.

And furthermore, we now have euphemisms such as credit crunch (unwise financial gambling), sub-prime (reckless lending) and other ways of avoiding the real truth.

Imagine if President Kennedy in launching the moon landing mission in 1961 had described the objective not as to “get an American to the moon and back safely in this decade” but instead “seize leadership in the space race through aligned technology initiatives and leveraged team-based routines”? The whole purpose of the Kennedy mission statement was to express concisely and clearly what was intended so that everyone could understand – and support.

Professor Russell Ackoff, one of the Grand Old Men of management theory, commented on the contributions of a business school education.

He said it gives you:

1. A vocabulary that enables you to speak with authority on things you don’t understand,

2. A set of operating principles that lets you withstand any amount of contrary evidence, and

3. A ticket to a job where you can learn something about management

Perhaps we should take a leaf out of Kennedy’s book, and have a concerted effort to ruthlessly stamp out grotesque use of words and phrases which seek to obfuscate and avoid rather than illuminate and inform.

Will anyone out there care to join this campaign?

While I was at the EDS lair
I met some people who were not there
They were not there again today
Perhaps they have all departed away

Last week I attended a meeting with EDS, which was more of a virtual meeting involving as it did various parties dialling in as a telephone conference, and a number of presentations made remotely. The people participating in the physical meeting in the room were greatly outnumbered by the virtual participants.

Interspersed with the exchanges on the meeting items were the disembodied squawks from the telephone of “now attending” and “now departing” as virtual participants came and went. In addition, there were no drinks provided at the meeting, not even cold water on what was a baking hot day.

None of this is unique to EDS, nor a precedent in itself. However it does exemplify the apparent virtualisation of human and social interaction at some workplaces, and the increasingly incidental and isolated role that people play in this.

There used to purportedly exist a perhaps apocryphal practice in some US companies where meetings took place in rooms without tables and chairs. The philosophy was presumably that if people had to stand, then the meeting would be much shorter.

I had experiences of two such events at Ford and Royal Mail, although I suspect these were due more to default than design. The equivalent of the arbitration service ACAS in Ireland also had a practice of holding long conciliation and arbitration meetings without food or fluid provided, again on the same principle of reaching a successful outcome sooner than otherwise might be the case.

The world of work will be that much poorer without human and social interaction. Many people meet their partners at work, and their social circles include work colleagues. After all, most of us will spend a third of our lives – probably more in years to come as people retire later – at work.

Taken to its logical conclusion, meetings without people may get the business done more quickly, but at what cost?

We have a glimpse of the future, and it’s not working.

The technology of communication can be liberating but can also imprison.

Once upon a time, the Christmas break meant just that – a break. Now with remote access, mobile telephones, Blackberrys and the like, are you turned on when you would rather be switched off?

Is this required by the organisations we work for, or self-perpetuated?

Shouldn’t a holiday be a holiday?