ON CORPORATES AND NAMING CONVENTIONS
People have been working in companies for ages now.
The work to be done is the same, nothing really changes. But the nomenclatures change. What's in a name, said Shakespeare ( or Confucius, or Chanakya, it doesn't matter), a rose by any other name will smell as sweet.
Oh no, it will not. The sweetness of the rose depends on the name.
In those days when a worker used to fit nuts and bolts, he used to be called "turner and fitter". When the Parsi in Mumbai took up the job of opening soda bottles, he was called Sodabottleopenerwala and it became the surname for his descendents, there was even a Test Umpire of that name.
But MNCs are a different breed. Especially American MNCs.
There are no workers in MNCs. Oh no, that would be too demeaning. The entry level position is called Associate. In those days factory personnel departments used to be called Personnel Department. No longer, they are now Human Resources. In those days they used to fire people. No longer. Now they downsize, optimize, and rightsize. So can you guess what the Associate HR Rightsizing does? No, he is not a tailor's assistant in charge of taking measurements!
In one of earlier jobs, mid career, I carried the title Senior Director Projects. Why Senior? I never found out. What projects? I still don't know, I was doing a job, like everyone else. Why Director? Ah, that's because Americans love the word Director. It makes the person feel like he is directing something, like a movie Director lording it on the sets. I had no one reporting to me in that particular role, but that doesn't matter.
Talking of that, note that word, role. No one does a job anymore, it's all role.
I believe in the US, sweepers are called Associate Janitorial Services. Some of them are called Janitorial Services Executive.
You must be wondering where all this comes from. Well, I figured that the key is, in American companies, no is a worker. Everyone is a leader! I have attended dozens of leadership seminars in my career but never, not one, followership seminar!
And what about the departments that you work for? In those days, you used to work for Painting Department, Punch Card Department, Stores Department, etc. in a car factory, Watch Factory, or Curtain Shop. Pretty clear right? If your grandmother asked you what job you are doing, you could tell her you are a welder in the Assembly Department of a Car Factory. Pretty clear, grandmother gets the idea.
Nowadays things have changed. The departments in an in-house software company are called Projects, Services, Delivery, and Process. Then someone says, Process doesn't quite cut it, so let's call it Business Process. Then BPOs get a bad name, people figure out that it's a sweat shop with a different name. So they call it KPO, Knowledge Process Outsourcing. Why? Because we are going up the value chain! Everyone wants to constantly go up the value chain, in case you didn't know.
The company you work for is an in-house unit, a "captive", doing work only for the US parent. Bangalore is the captive capital of the world. Every office here is a captive. Now that word captive reminded everyone of colonial times, when we were slaves of the British. So they changed it to Development Centre. Not quite good enough. Changed it to Global Development Centre. Sounded alright.
Then that became unpopular for some reason, they changed it to Global Capability Centre. Working for a US Vertical. What's a vertical? It's just a department of the parent organisation.
At some point they put together all the different verticals working for a particular service in India, and called it a Horizontal. What does that mean? Don't be stupid and expose your ignorance by asking, our VP has just been promoted to Head of Vertical Horizontals!
Meanwhile, everyone started getting a severe inferiority complex. Here they are, slogging away, for what? What is changing?
I know, said one bright lad, in a meeting one day. We are all change agents! Changing what? No one asks, people in the meeting have worked long enough for an MNC to know that they should not ask such questions. But somehow, Change Agent didn't become popular.
Some other bright spark in another MNC, very likely a CEO used to spin doctoring, came up with the term Transformation! Now, that sounds good. Brilliant! Every MNC in Bangalore very soon had people working in the Transformation Department. They were always transforming something.
I thought that was the end of it. You can't get better than that. But obviously I was mistaken.
This is from today's news, and I quote:
Accenture will consolidate its services - strategy, consulting, technology and operations - into a single integrated Business Unit called Reinvention Services under the leadership of Manish Sharma.
Unquote
Now this Manish Sharma happens to be my wife's MBA batchmate. She says the entire batch is really proud of him, he has done very well for himself.
But do you really know what he does for a living, I asked? Oh, he is reinventing, obviously, said the wife, giving me that pitying look that wives reserve for their husbands.
As in, what is his job?, I asked. Silence, from the wife's side.
I suspect she doesn't know. I doubt if Manish Sharma himself knows.
Just wait and watch. By the time the year is out, every MNC in Bangalore will consolidate their horizontals and verticals into Reinvention Centers.
Progress, after all, needs to have a name.
