Crazy Airline Gobbledegook Nonsense

The airline business is like nothing on earth, and airline people are some of the most common interactions we consultants have. I thought I would take a minute to note some of the crazy words that come out of their mouths.

Note that I'm not talking about jargon - every field has special weird words for weird things. I'm talking about weird words for common things that didn't need renaming.

Weigh in in the comments if you've got more to add!

• Aircraft - This is one of the most common words to escape from the lips of airline people. I counted it at least three dozen times in the safety video alone! But no one outside the airline industry says aircraft. To us normals, it's an airplane, a jet, or most likely just a plane.
• Approach - No one is ever asked to "come over", "line up" or "step up". No, at airports you approach people and things, implying that you'll never get there. And at airports, sometimes it seems like you never will! Can you imagine if this odd wording was adopted by society as a whole? Would you approach the counter at Burger King, a professor's office, or your own bed?
• Beverage Service - "Welcome to Olive Garden! Your waitress will be here shortly with the beverage service!" Never gonna happen.
• Nautical terms - "Ahoy there, matey! Welcome aboard the pirate ship, Southwest Airlines Flight 123! I be the captain and this be my crew!" I suppose this one is debatable, since crew is used to describe the staff of any vessel (in the air, on the water, under the sea, or even in space) but it's such an odd historical link between ocean liners and aircraft (there I go). Why didn't they adopt rail terminology instead? Wouldn't it be cool to have a conductor and an engineer on an air-coach?
• Fly (as a verb) - This is pretty widely adopted in society as a whole, but it's another oddity. I have often been thanked for "flying Delta", but I'm pretty sure I didn't actually do any of the flying. I just got on board to eat peanuts and drink beer with the other passengers. Why not just call it travel? But that's not quite as sexy as flying, is it?
• Onboarding and Deplaning - You aren't just getting on a plane, or even boarding, now you're "onboarding the aircraft!" Talk about needless doublespeak! And yet I've never heard anyone refer to offboarding. No, that's deplaning! But let's stick to onboarding for a minute: Isn't it fun that this pretentious, obnoxious word is shared by the loathed corporate critters in HR?
• Operations - Another ridiculously common term inside aviation that has little meaning out in the real world is operations. The only normals who need to learn this term are us frequent fliers, since irregular operations (abbreviated IrrOps) is such a common occurrence.
• Rollerboards - This is so common it's becoming a real word! I have to assume the adjectival phrase "roll-aboard" (as in luggage) became a noun before the eggcorn effect took hold. Now they're rollerboards, which sounds like a questionable interrogation tactic! But they're still too big for commuter jets.
• Passive Voice - In a world full of rules, it pays to be passive. "That needs to be turned off" deflects obvious questions better than "I have no idea why I'm demanding that you turn off your computer, but I think some law says that you have to." Airline personnel have mastered passive voice!
• Podium - For some reason, that thing the gate agent stands behind isn't a counter (that's where the ticketing agent stands), a desk, a table, or a lectern (the proper term) but a podium. Even though they're never raised off the ground. Oh well.
• Product - MBA-ization comes to the airline industry! The act of flying your corpse to Des Moines is now referred to as "the product", as is (presumably) carrying the mail and the literal corpses in the cargo hold. Which is humorous, since the actual profitable product is pushing branded credit cards.

What are your favorite examples of airline doublespeak? Or am I just being a prick? Sound off in the comments!

Photo by MarkNye

What is a "3-4-5 Consultant"?

There are many terms in consulting that just sort of seep through our consciousness without needing to be defined. But this kind of "consultantese" can mean trouble for newbies. So it is with "3-4-5", an important but opaque term of art in this industry. What does "3/4/5" mean to a consultant?

Put plainly, "3-4-5" means that, for each week you're working:

• You'll spend 3 nights at hotels
• You'll spend 4 days working at the client site
• You'll spend the fifth day back at the office

In other words, a 3-4-5 consultant can be expected to be away from home for four days and three nights just about every week.

Usually, the "3-4-5" schedule looks like this:

• Board a regional jet Monday at 5:30 AM for a flight to some lame city (Rochester? St. Louis? Frankfurt?), spend a long Monday at a boring office park, skip dinner, and get a late check in at the Hampton Inn (since that's the best they've got out there)
• Listen to a bunch of dispirited B- and C-players complain about their life all day Tuesday and Wednesday at the client site, the Applebee's, and the "inn"
• Pack up Thursday morning, skipping the waffles, and make an excuse to disappear at noon so you can fly back home before missing another night
• Fill out expense reports and attend "team meetings" all day Friday

Metaphorically, however, "3-4-5" is a promise from the firm. It means they intend to achieve some mythical level of "work/life balance" by "allowing" you to be home more than half your nights. "We're the good guys," they'll claim during your interview. "Unlike those body shops, we give our consultants a 3/4/5 week, treating them like the professionals they are!"

The new hire hears this and immediately dreams up a "3-2-2" scheme, traveling all day Monday, eating at fancy restaurants and going out clubbing three nights, and heading home first thing Thursday before skipping the last day of work. Do not fall into this trap. This is not how it is!

In reality, "3-4-5" often devolves into "4-4-5" or even "5-5-5", since the client never agreed only to have you on-site four days. Plus, "we have a staff meeting first thing Monday, and where were you Thursday at 4:30 when we needed you?" I've known many consultants who fly on Sunday and Saturday, even!

So there you have it. An ideal "3-4-5" consultant spends three nights and four days on the road. Sometimes.

Consultantese: What's The Dollar Amount?

Dollar Amount

Noun
Salesman-speak for the money part of a contract. Just hearing this phrase makes hookers and lap dancers raise their fee.

I seriously get the willies when I hear otherwise worthwhile consultants adopt BS phrases like this.

Bonus: Yeah, that's the same BS clipart from the NSA PRISM deck. Ain't the Internet grand?

What In The World Is A Deliverable?

If there is one constant in consulting it is the production of deliverables. But what the heck is a "deliverable" anyway? This is one of the first lessons in consultantese that new consultants learn...

Deliverables are pretty much what we consultants do: Deliver stuff. So, leave it to the consulting mind to come up with a suitably vague yet descriptive term for whatever we crap out at the client site!

A deliverable can be anything, but traditionally it's a full written report, printed and bound, delivered with an accompanying presentation. That's the Ultimate Deliverable.

But lately I've been successful in lobbying for lesser deliverables. After all, aren't bound reports kind of "1970's Rand" and don't we live 4 decades in the future?

After wowing my clients with my mad PowerPoint skills, I began de-emphasizing the printed report. Finally, I just delivered my write-up via email, focusing entirely on the preso.

Then came The Big Move: I modified the SoW to specify the report as an optional component, leaving just the presentation as the master deliverable.

Wouldn't you know it, the clients jumped all over the chance to save $10k by not having a printed report prepared. Sales went up, and management got on board. Yes!

Now I loathe The Deliverable a little less, since it's usually just a presentation. And, as every consultant knows, you can get away with pretty much anything you want in a presentation!

"Project Report" illustration by Nick Bramhall

The Optimization of Leveraging

Courtesy of Alert Guest Blogger David Tang:

Consultants.  We're always optimizing, always leveraging -- always in the pursuit of minimizing our workload while maximizing our lifestyle.  This mode of conduct carries from using the expense policy, to accumulating hotel points, to creating our client deliverables.

At the start of every project, it's always a scramble to find good internal docs that we can leverage.  The problem often is that the internal library of documents is poorly organized and documented.  The original uploader has probably left the firm and isn't around to answer any pressing questions.  Well, here's a tip.  Check out Flevy.com (http://flevy.com) for documents that can be leveraged.  In fact, Flevy is a marketplace for consulting-type business documents.  It's organized by business function (e.g. marketing strategy, supply chain), industry, and file type.  And, of course, any documents purchased are expensed back to the project. (Hey, 40 SPG points here and there adds up!)

Oh, and don't forget... at the end of the engagement, repackage the documents as your own and list it on Flevy for the next consultant to leverage.

Word of the Day

Demoable
Pronunciation: dem-o-ah-bull
Function: adjective
Inflected Form(s): demoed; demo·ing
Etymology: ERP Implementation
Date: 2008

1 a: the ability to display or present for a show or an audience. "The product is demoable."
2 a: the ability to show in a social setting. "My new boy/girlfriend is demoable; I can introduce him/her to the family."

'Scuse Me?

I am not making this up:

We're working on a proposal, and I just got an email that read:

"...please send me some estimation of synergy quantification and KPI’s."

I don't have a clue what that even means.

Redisorganization Artlce

Background: We are sick and tired of being redisorganized.
Objective: To systematically review the empirical evidence for organizational theories and repeated reorganizations.
Methods: We did not find anything worth reading, other than Dilbert, so we fantasized. Unfortunately, our fantasies may well resemble many people's realities. We are sorry about this, but it is not our fault.
Results: We discovered many reasons for repeated reorganizations, the most common being ‘no good reason’. We estimated that trillions of dollars are being spent on strategic and organizational planning activities each year, thus providing lots of good reasons for hundreds of thousands of people, including us, to get into the business. New leaders who are intoxicated with the prospect of change further fuel perpetual cycles of redisorganization. We identified eight indicators of successful redisorganizations, including large consultancy fees paid to friends and relatives.
Conclusions: We propose the establishment of ethics committees to review all future redisorganization proposals in order to put a stop to uncontrolled, unplanned experimentation inflicted on providers and users of the health services.

See full article: www.jrsm.org/cgi/content/full/98/12/563

New Addition to the Consultantese Dictionary

Sent to us by an alert consultant in Washington DC:

The new term is:

"ORGANIC GROWTH"

Does anyone know what the heck this actually means?

People are apparently using it left and right.

Makes me think of some sort of parasitic tumor, or maybe a weed.