It's a win-win!

Dear Congressman,

Since the 90's a plethora of new terminology has hit the vocabulary of the English speaking business world. My guess is it was generally created by consultants as a way to extract more dollars from the vaults of corporate America, as doublespeak and nonsensical words have always had a magic about that make the Director of Personnel smile and the Chief Financial Officer reluctantly hand over the hard earned loot.

Some great examples are:

Multitask - ah!!! the old favorite... this one basically is an attempt to convince management that the average working joe/jane can be given three assignments at one time and be expected to complete all of them flawlessly. For example:
Boss: "Dawkins, good morning, great day to work for Empathy Enterprises, isn't it?"
Dawkins: "Good morning, sir."
Boss: "Quiet day today so I only have three task for you."
Dawkins: (does not answer but has an uneasy look as he stares back at his boss)
Boss: "First, I need the Guttenberg Bible translated into Swahili. Second, the entire internet is down worldwide, fix it. Oh, and third, I need my dry cleaning picked up across town. Check back with me in about an hour and give me a status update."
Boss walks away as Dawkins continues to state blankly...

Seamless integration - picture Vito Corleone in the Godfather after the meeting with Sollozzo when he says to his son "never let anyone outside the family know what you are thinking". This is the basis of seamless integration. The corporation either rolls out an entirely new product line or buys a competitor and then trots out the marketing geeks in $10,000 suits and perfect teeth to smile and talk about the "seamless integration". In reality, the marketing geeks are acting as traffic cops standing in front of a corporate equivalent of a 20 car pile up with multiple fatalities. Their job is to wave people past while stating "nothing to see here... move on". This is because the seamless integration behind the curtain generally tends to be all out corporate warfare, complete with turf wars, endless meetings to assign blame, and stressed out email jousting.

Reengineer - as if engineering something in the first time around was not enough. No... we now have to reengineer it! Basic consultant speak for slapping lipstick on the same pig and then spending millions on convincing the media that it is an entirely different pig.