So Many Words, So Little Time

he recent designation of the Education Department's Office of Student Financial Assistance as a performance- based organization (PBO) got me thinking. If OSFA is the USA's first PBO, then what's the best handle for other government agencies? PCOs (punch-the-clock organizations), where achievement is measured by attendance? Or would CBE (check-box enterprise) be a better designation to indicate focus on process rather than results?

Which brings us to semantics. What's distinctive about PBOs is that they allow senior executives to earn bonuses if they achieve annual performance goals. PBOs make achieving these goals easier by permitting flexibility for selected kinds of hires and purchases. (This leads to questions about why current hiring and purchasing rules are still in place, but that's another matter).

So, despite what they're called, the big difference between a PBO and everything else isn't performance, which presumably is the goal of all government agencies, but compensation. And in that case, maybe what we need these days is clearer definitions, starting with PBOs.

Here are some possibilities:

• PBO (performance-based organization)-A governmental enterprise that is actually an EFAO (employee financial assistance organization) linguistically dressed up in politically acceptable language.
• Bureaucracy-Other people's rules; not to be confused with our way of doing things, as codified in our own very sensible systems and procedures.
• Paradigm shift-A state of grace that permits a person being questioned to ignore all challenges on the basis that those who haven't made the shift, can't possibly follow the drift. No action is required to achieve this state other than to assert the claim.
• Consensus-That which results when the staff finally figures out what the boss wanted to hear all along.
• Crisis management-The process of creating crises in order to force the management of pre-existing issues. Often aided by the invention of an external bogeyman or enemy. When consultants are paid to create the crises, this process is called "change management."
• Day care-The roster of activities created for the purpose of keeping visiting brass occupied.
• Knowledge worker-A person who has traded union protection for carpal tunnel syndrome.
• Millennium bug-The totally unexpected computer problem, also known
  as Y2K, triggered when the year 2000
  unexpectedly follows directly on the heels of 1999.
• Regurgitate-What many employees want to do after they have been reorganized, restructured, reengineered and otherwise reinvented, and then are asked to attack their jobs with renewed vigor.
• Values-What we say we do. Not to be confused with what we actually do.
• With all due respect-Formal way of saying, "My, you really are an idiot, aren't you."

So many words, so little time. Yet there's a point to the jest. What we say, to ourselves and to others, shapes the options we see and the actions we take. The more accurately we understand a proposed action, the better the odds of achieving the outcomes we seek.

So here's to the success of PBOs everywhere. And here's to cutting through any performance-based bits of jargon so we can understand, at least roughly, what we mean to do-and why we think it will work.

Eileen Shapiro, a consultant with The Hillcrest Group in Cambridge Mass., writes books to which she appends her fractured lexicons. Her latest glossary, "The Devil's Companion to the Fad Surfer's Dictionary," is included in her new book, The Seven Deadly Sins of Business (Capstone, 1999).