“Needless jargon in the workplace is baffling employees and widening the divide between management and staff, a survey suggests. Investors in People said that the proliferation of phrases such as ‘blue-sky thinking’ and ‘brain dump’ was damaging to British industry”.

Is this actually true? It would be interesting to see the actual survey questions, and how loaded they were; I do very much doubt there has actually been a ‘proliferation’ of needless so-called management-speak anyway, and when it is used gratuitously I predict that, just as anywhere I’ve ever worked, the user is quickly laughed out of the office for being a total prat.

But the main reason I rate this as a non-story is because it is hardly a new story – the epitome of a management-speak gobshite was Gus Hedges in Drop the Dead Donkey dating way back to 1990 – that’s 16 years ago – and the phenomenon itself surely goes back further to the rise of yuppie in the mid-1980s. So why bring it up again as if it’s something new?