Following random links is a lost joy of the “web”. Now it’s following random panda/cat/puppy videos… (yes, also fun, saw an amazing vid of a baby alpaca wearing a hat today…but anyway…)
One of the ways I really enjoyed the web when it first took root was the pathways of ideas you could meander down. Today I took a few different roads and wound up spending some time reading about the evolution of office speak / jargon. I’ll share some of it with you but if nothing else, take this quiz and find out which jargon is your “native” language. Turns out mine is “Life Hacker” – scroll down to read my quiz results. I have mixed feelings on this, given another article I read today about “The mindfulness conspiracy” which rang uncomfortably true but we’ll explore than another day.
According to this article from the Atlantic magazine, business jargon, all that stuff we roll our eyes at while at work and that made Dilbert so funny, started emerging in the 1960s.
“A pair of hypotheses rose out of these labs (context = 1 @ MIT and 1 @ Carnegie Mellon). As McGregor explained in his 1960 book The Human Side of Enterprise, managers could think of their employees in one of two ways: as lazy work-haters who need to be closely supervised (Theory X), or as ambitious self-motivators who thrive in an atmosphere of trust (Theory Y). “This introduced the idea that effective managers believe in their people and trust them and don’t feel that they have to monitor them all the time,” Schein said.”
Hmmm. Pretty much seems to be the same 2 schools of thought still to this day, and most companies seem to flip between the two depending on current leadership and management trends. That’s a little amusing or discouraging, depending on your mindset when you read it.
But something that really popped out at me was this 1930’s learning from an earlier research effort “…They concluded that the workers’ physical environment wasn’t what made them better—it was that they thought their bosses were paying attention to them“. My interpretation is that the important point in that statement is that all of us desire to feel like our contributions matter.
As we go about our day to day, let’s thank and recognize people for their contributions. The person who helped with that report, the lady who bagged your groceries, the person who made your coffee. True to my “life hacker” nature I believe we can balance boundaries with passion. We can get personal fulfillment at work without passion leading us to push ourselves and our co-workers too hard – if we stay aware of the downsides of buying in to our work being our passion without applying some critical thought.
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My quiz results:
Your brain is dominated by “Life Hacker” office speak
The idea that professional and personal life should be “balanced” defies the 1960s-era desire for self-fulfillment through work. This strain of thinking draws on the wisdom of mass-market self-help books, which are themselves a commercialized form of optimizer. Favorite words include bandwidth, unplug, and life-hack.
Great post 🙂