They are only words but...

There are many types of words that annoy, irritate, or offend people. Since I'm off Twitter now, I'll have to use this blog to air my personal gripes.

A friend highlighted "icon" and "iconic" as the latest label to be applied to almost anything that is in the slightest memorable or celebrity. Of course, Michael Jackson's untimely death brought out the "iconic" status for him. Joanna Lumley was an icon a few weeks abo. But since it had been mentioned to me by Carol, I'm hearing it all too frequently.

Another Twitter acquaintance was irritated by the frequency of the word "absolutely," particularly when it was usually an affirmative response to a question, where a simple "yes" would definitely suffice. He would time Radio 4's Today programme to see how long it go before hearing an "absolutely."

Of course, there's a load of management-speak weasle-wording and the one that springs to mind, possibly because it is heard so often, is "going forward" - used when the speaker means "in [the] future."

And I've only recently noticed the increasingly frequent occurrence of "key" (and old Fordism, in my experience) when the speaker means "important" in a phrase such as "this is key to our success."

And finally (for the time being), a rather geeky irritant. I belong to a photography 'forum' type of website, where many of the contributors claim that they have made some adjustments to their photograph using "CS4".

Oh, no they haven't! They have done their tweaking in Adobe Photoshop. And the version they are using is from the Adobe Creative Suite, version 4; CS4. As there are several other programs in the Creative Suite, using the term CS4 is meaningless, as it could be version 4 of any number of software products within the suite. Stop it! Please.

I'm out

I was rather enjoying Twitter, until one of the people I was following said they had earned TONS of followers from such-and-such website. I clicked on the link in her Tweet and saw what was on offer. It didn't look genuine, so I closed the website.

A few minutes later "I" posted several Tweets about things I knew nothing about. OK, I suppose there's nothing new in that! But the fact is, it was not me who was Tweeting this stuff. My Twitter account had been compromised, accessed, hacked.

I left Facebook because of what I would call it's "hidden openness" - meaning that it was not always entirely obvious that almost anybody can jump from 'friend' to 'friend' and find out all sorts of stuff.

Things seemed a little better on Twitter, where you could block people from seeing your Tweets, and not receive theirs. But in the end, social networking sites seem to be ripe hunting grounds for the scumbags and low-lifes that invade the internet for all sorts of reasons, from what they consider fun, through nuisance to criminal. I don't think I'll be joining another "social network" any time soon so I'm afraid I have to say to Twitter, "I'm out."

Make decision-meetings decide things

Seth Godin, self-styled author and agent of change (a business thinking guru) recently blogged "At Ford, they used to have meetings to prepare for meetings, just to be sure everyone had their story straight."

My response to that is: I know, it's true, I was there, we called them pre-meetings. I also wondered whether it was appropriate to use the past tense... :o)

Seth Godin's blog (http://sethgodin.typepad.com/ suggested nine good strategies to make meetings work well.

Here's another idea for successful decision-meeting success:

Some meetings are intended to make decisions, to get answers to questions. So the agenda should not be a list of subjects for discussion (that's too open-ended, and helps generate never-ending meetings). If a meeting is to make a decision, then it's likely that the decision is an answer to a question. So the agenda should be a list of questions, to which the meeting must find an answer. And you must minute the answers generated by the meeting.

Otherwise, you failed to meet the objective of the meeting.