Ridiculing corporate jargon has its consequences

If you are reading this today at 8am, please think of me. I will have just arrived at the London HQ of Deloitte for a state-of-the-art corporate bollocking, writes   Lucy Kellaway

The occasion is likely to be quite tricky and I would therefore appreciate it if you could send me some courage to get me through.

Here is how my predicament came about.

Last Monday I wrote 900 words (many of them quite unpleasant, a few excessively so) about the new Deloitte employee handbook. The next day a polite woman from the company phoned to invite me to lunch with the UK head.

I negotiated a downgrade to breakfast and a deal was struck. There it is, sitting in my diary for Monday, July 9th, at the ungodly hour of 8am.

The rules of the modern bollocking are simple. First, it should take place over a meal. The bollocker is the host and, although he will probably be incandescent with rage, he must never let on. The crosser he is, the more assiduously he must ply the bollockee with dainty refreshments and politeness.

The guest will be squirming but must try to look engaged and casual. Both sides will converse politely for rather longer than feels natural.

During the bollocking, it is not usual to discuss the cause of the upset or refer to it in any way.

Instead, the host uses the meeting as a way of setting the record straight, perhaps by showing the corporate video or by pronouncing a few of the firm's great strengths.

The guest is more or less required to nod and agree with whatever the host says in the hope it will soon be over.

It wasn't always thus. Over the past two decades, I have received more than my share of bollockings. It is my job to ridicule purveyors of corporate jargon and, as this tends to go down badly with the authors, it creates a demand for retribution. In the old days, retribution did not include a free meal.

Then people used to follow their gut. That is, if some ignorant, trouble-making journalist slagged you off in print, you gave vent to your most natural desire to cut her up into pieces and feed her to your cat.

At least, you couldn't quite do that as it would be illegal as well as messy, but you did the next best thing which was to get very angry indeed.

But now the PR people have taken over and emotion has been outlawed. For a fee, they tell their clients not to get cross, that it alienates already volatile journos still further.

Instead, they advise them to do as the home office vainly tries to do with criminals - to go for prevention rather than punishment. To cajole and to seek to persuade is the order of the day.

It sounds sensible, but alas, it isn't. I can remember each of the roastings I've received with a vividness that inevitably attaches itself to such humiliating events.

There was Sir Richard Greenbury and the stinging letter he wrote to me. Lord Weinstock and Lord King, who rang up to yell down the phone at me and at my boss.

The head of a small oil company who went purple in the face and banged his fist down on the desk. It is not to my credit that I have offended each of these people only once; there was no repeat performance.

So what about today's breakfast? It won't stick in my mind with the same forbidding potency, but might it change my view of the company? I doubt it. In my experience it is hard to squirm and listen at the same time.

There is one possibility that nags away at me - my host will have read this column before our breakfast and will have chucked out the croissants in a rage and even now will be putting on his boxing gloves.

God, I hope not! Anyone for embedding?

Above, I said it was my job to write about extreme corporate communication. There were two lively examples of this last week.

One was an e-mail forwarded to me gleefully by a dozen different people around the world.

It was a farewell e-mail from a JP Morgan banker outlining just how much he hated the company. It was a riveting read: clear, witty and fresh. Alas, it was a hoax.

The second was a press release from Aviva, the financial services company, to announce the launch of its "Respect Diversity Toolkit". It was not clear, witty or fresh. Alas, it was for real. My toolkit contains hammers and screwdrivers. Aviva's contains an interactive game and an "award-winning" DVD called "Embracing Diversity". And its purpose? "To empower managers to embed the key principles of respect and diversity in the Aviva World."

Although I myself am not in the Aviva world I am scratching my head as to what all this embracing and embedding is about.

Actually that's a lie. I'm not scratching my head at all. This "global diversity learning resource" is about "sharing best practice" with "professionals" in the "HR community". In other words, it isn't about anything at all.

As a PS, I should add that I am available to any HR professional from the Aviva world for a breakfast bollocking on most days this week, except for today, when I have a prior engagement.