The FORE School of Management in New Delhi has just held a conclave on Talent 2012 — From Textbook Jargon to Reality. It was sorely needed. The best B-schools believe that their alumni must be armed with the latest in arcane business lingo. Cash cows are passé. Besides, even the man on the street knows what you are talking about. Today, you must be able to sprinkle your conversation with fiscal cliffs and e-holes.

The eholes at the Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs) — and that includes several professors — have been exchanging a lot of jargon recently. IIM Ahmedabad, in particular, has been trying to reinforce its superiority through a new burst of business jargon. It has not been having the best of times of late. It has been unable to find a director to take over from the current incumbent. The replacement cost (an expression popularised in India by stockmarket speculator Harshad Mehta) is too high. Literally. Potential directors have been asking for a remuneration package of Rs 1 crore plus; the current director gets Rs 20 lakh. Besides, IIMA has also been displaced from its status of being the hardest B-school in the world to get into by the new McDonald's Hamburger University in Shanghai. It hurts when others use their noodle better than you. They have the beef; you have the complaints.

The origin of jargon is in the desire to create an exclusive world where others may not enter. It may be worthwhile to examine what they are talking about at IIMA. Niche-iima, the institute’s marketing club, has a section on “Jargon demystified”. Here is one entry:

Channel conflict: When two different distribution channels of the same manufacturer find themselves competing for the same set of customers.

(For ordinary folks, it’s when the husband wants to watch the IPL match and the wife the latest instalment of her favourite soap.)

You can’t also forget that IIMA gave you Zero Day. That’s when companies invited to campus on the first day of the placement season wanted something better. So they began placement a day earlier for the zeros to get together. Zero Day having established itself, recruiting companies want something better still. Pre-P (placement), with its suggestion that you are waiting to answer nature’s call rather than a corporate call, has not made the cut. Even Zero Day has vanished now.

But if you look closely at jargon today, it is no longer that interesting or exciting. There was a time when US colleges boasted slang like da bomb (awesome). Today, the best you can get is bling-bling, which meant jewellery earlier but has mutated into anything expensive now.

The secret language — the code that preserves the freemasonry — has now moved to another medium — SMS. This too is not new. But it is only over the past few years that cellphones have become ubiquitous. Emoticons, too, once the preserve of online chat, have moved to the mobile. Gr8.

“Jargon defines a particular group,” says Mumbai-based HR consultant D. Singh. It can take parochial form. For instance, if there are three Tamilians in your office, they will talk in Tamil in front of others who don’t understand the language. The engineers will have a lingo of their own.

“In life, you belong to many clubs,” says Singh. “The trouble starts when people try to enter clubs to which they don’t belong or have not been invited.” Yet, in any job environment, you have to try and belong.

Singh gives a spot of advice. Take your time, he says. Second, latch on to one or two people and get them to ease your entry. Finally, in your own way, contribute to the jargon.

This might seem to be giving too much importance to jargon which is, after all, a relatively transient thing. But using jargon is a way of signalling who and what you are. Everyone wants to docket you and put you in the right place in their mental map. Then the eholes will have no channel conflict.

NINE MEN’S MORRIS

The business jargon game: Best of 2012

Brogrammer

A frat-boy-esque computer programmer; an anti-nerd

Core competency

What you know best

deceptionist

A receptionist adept at blocking visitors, rather than facilitating their needs.

dining at desco

Eating at your desk; the dabbawalas’ delight.

E-hole

A client, employee or co-worker who uses email to create problems.

fauxtrepreneur

A person who comes up with myriad business ideas but never actually sees one out.

Jargonaut

A connoisseur of corporate slang

’Dark Thirty

Far too early in the morning

Vertical

What you thought was a line function.

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