DESCENDING from the corporate equivalent of the lofty Swiss Magic Mountain dreamt up by Thomas Mann in his great 20th-century novel of the same name, your reporter has been decompressing from days of Davos-speak among the tycoons, oligarchs and well-heeled hangers-on.
A mixture of corporate jargon, future-fixation and deployment of airy concepts intended to convey prescient wisdom is a linguistic hallmark of the World Economic Forum. 
In ambition and ambiguity, Davos-speak easily outdoes the quotidian office jargon, mocked by the television satire “The Office” in both its British and American incarnations. 
The Forum’s denizens do not merely talk of “going forward,” “drilling down,” and “circling back”—the verbal chaff of mid-raking sorts. No, this elite club produces fresh sesquipedalian bamboozlement. The following concoctions are just a modest sample gathered throughout the event:
“We can’t play in every vertical” (though we will of course ensure that those welcome “horizontal synergies” do not impact adversely on “core brand”).
“The future will be contribution-defined, not benefit-specific.”
And a farewell thought from Marissa Mayer, the Yahoo boss, “Passion is a gender-neutralising force.”
At least the…Continue reading

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