Jargon Bugaboo

After a long four week break, Term 3 is a distant memory, like that vague feeling you get thinking of an ex-girlfriend, a bittersweet remembrance of having learned something about life and about oneself, but overall not an experience to repeat again soon…

So, here it is January 2005, and I am back at Duke and jumping right into Term 4. This term journeys from the land of quantitative deterministic thinking (finance, econ, accounting) in the last term and crosses into that more nebulous region of stochastic models, the “it depends” school-of-thought. Corporate Strategy, Organizational Design and Operations Management are the flavor this season. And as such, the jargon also changes...no more simple terms like options and futures, or neat little acronyms like ROI and EVA. We are now in the realm of concepts and multi-word, multi-syllabic descriptors, such as “social complexity”, “causal ambiguity” and “time compression diseconomies.” (When I was in grad school, we used to call this "hand-waving”, when you use big words to speculate on the less tangible conclusions of scientific data – little did I know that much of business theory is like this).

Some initial thoughts… despite my pooh-poohing the jargon, I have high hopes for Corporate Strategy – Rick Wagoner, CEO of GM, and Rick Goings, CEO of Tupperware, are scheduled to be guest speakers this term, and judging from the syllabus it looks like we will delve much into the business of doing business. The aim of Organizational Design is a bit less clear to me right now. It seems to be a hybrid of Managerial Effectiveness from the first term, with a bit of analytical modeling thrown into the mix (to the extent one can analyze and model an “effective” organization). Operations Management should prove useful as my little company scales up production and takes on the supply chain “bugaboo” (that’s my jargon for one big hairy audacious mess).