Story in glossary entries
continuing with sharing my experiments in storytelling containers
A Guide to Corporate Speak
The Roadmap (I): An Excel spreadsheet enumerating future product releases for the next four quarters. The reason why you are here.
Greg: In charge of the roadmap; therefore, in charge of you.
Alignment: What your team does before sharing anything with Greg. Also known as getting your stories straight. Usually involves creating a PowerPoint presentation, but Greg prefers pictures to words, so you’ll have to take out all the bullet points later and replace them with shapes.
Learnings: What you are sharing with Greg. Know that a learning is not a fact. A learning is an invitation to a fact.
The Roadmap (II): The reason why Greg declines your invitation to a fact. “I hear the data. But we have to release by Q2,” he says. “But great work,” he adds, too late for it to mean anything.
Mark & Aileen: Greg’s bosses. The directors of your division. He calls them, in a display of erudition that surprises you and may have been put on solely for your benefit—he winks at you after he says it—Scylla and Charybdis.
All-Hands: What happens when Mark and Aileen convene a virtual meeting for the entire division. They are live and in-person at headquarters. The video feed is choppy. This is a chance to remember why you are all here.
Reorg: The All-Hands was too little, too late, so now Mark and Aileen are divorcing. Mark takes Software Enablement, Innovation Services, and a nice corner office at headquarters. Aileen gets Digital Valuestreams and the ability to work remotely from her ranch in Wyoming. You don’t get to choose which division you go with.
Replacement Greg: Actually, his name is Steve.
The Roadmap (III): “Can you please remind me how you are aligning your work to the roadmap?” Replacement Greg says. Replacement Greg cozied up to Aileen during the previous two quarters and for his trouble he gets to babysit your team. You can tell he feels cheated by the way he uses punctuation in his Teams messages. He asks if you’ll turn your camera on, but he doesn’t turn on his.
1:1: A fifteen minute meeting at four o’clock on a Thursday. Replacement Greg reads from a script. Twenty minutes later your computer freezes up. Credentials invalid.
Employee Severance Package: The PDF file Replacement Greg sends to your personal email the next day. It’s forty-five pages. You have twenty-four hours to sign.
writer's note
Another story I wrote in the span of an evening, working out my own feelings on the anniversary of being laid off. It's easy to make fun of corporate jargon, which is why this is just an experiment and not something I'd put forth as a real flash piece. It's harder for me to express the difficulty and frustration of trying to communicate in corporate culture, which often feels actively hostile to language.