BullFighter

August 4, 2003 1:02 PM

BullFighter is shareware that flags corporate jargon, like "mission critical asset foregrounding" and "value-added paradigm shift," in Word documents. Who developed it? Deloitte Consulting. Will wonders (or gimmicks) never cease?
posted by serafinapekkala (13 comments total)

I worked for a few summers at a management consulting firm, and boy could I have used this thing back then...ah, the mid-90's. I like that this thing has a purpose, yet it also burnishes their brand as "no-nonsense, post-bubble, trustworthy" consultants...wait, would that be redlined by BullFighter? Probably.
posted by serafinapekkala at 1:04 PM on August 4, 2003

According to this article, Deloitte themselves scored in the fair-to-middling range using the software.

Interesting idea. I somehow doubt the intended audience will do much with it, though.
posted by me3dia at 1:06 PM on August 4, 2003

Not nearly as much fun as business buzzword bingo.
posted by caddis at 1:34 PM on August 4, 2003

As a former employee of Deloitte Consulting, I'm confident that the Bullfighter was implemented simply by taking existing "obfuscatory solution engines" and running them in reverse.
posted by ahimsakid at 1:36 PM on August 4, 2003

Highly recommended. The glut of empty buzzphrases in our company documents has become something of a running gag in our office, so I tried this out a while back. I was howling. Bullfighter gave one of our documents a 0.4 (out of 10), and told me "It is possible that this document contains entire sentences devoid of dictionary-based words". I sent it to my supervisor.

Threadbait: what are some of your favourite buzzphrases? I'm partial to all things "leverage", "resource" (to mean "person"), and one that I saw in the above-mentioned doc: "revenue-oriented activities" (i.e. income).
posted by Succa at 1:54 PM on August 4, 2003

Management Speak Translation Guide
posted by entropy at 2:29 PM on August 4, 2003

Threadbait: what are some of your favourite buzzphrases?

i, for one, welcome the threadbait overlord. :) i was just today working on a quarterly report (sorry, "scorecard") that contained phrases like "milestone date," "measurement metrics" and "ownership risks and challenges" when "due date," "amount" and "responsibilites" would have worked just fine. this is nothing, though -- i had an internship at Reebok that involved several "all hands meetings" where we heard about "cross-pollinating departmental strategy" and "rebounding the core philosophy." eeeeeeeeeeep.
posted by serafinapekkala at 2:43 PM on August 4, 2003

I have my doubts about this doohickey, which I installed a month ago: I ran Bullfighter on a pair of interviews with Jurgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida and received a bull-free rating of "excellent" — the same numerical rating awarded to a transcript of some Watergate tapes (where it objected to the word "unintelligble" but not to "expletive").
posted by hairyeyeball at 2:51 PM on August 4, 2003

The consultancy consulted with its staff and came up with a list of more than 350 overused words. These included "leverage," "paradigm change," "end-to-end solution," "envisioneer" and "syngergize."

If your company is overusing the word "syngergize", find a new job immediately.
posted by eddydamascene at 3:12 PM on August 4, 2003

"paradigm change", there's your trouble, they clearly should be shifting paradigms, not changing them.
posted by biffa at 5:38 AM on August 5, 2003

Bush's State of the Union Address of January 2002 has a Bull value of 8.1, just short of Excellent. I guess I misunderestimated him.

Incomprehensibly, BullFighter rated my comedy act as Bull-free. I guess I have stealth bull****.
posted by basilwhite at 7:43 AM on August 5, 2003

A good while ago, I was working for one of them there dot-com startups. It was a pretty small operation, and I was standing around the front desk, listening to one of the Alpha MBAs talk about how he was re-writing our mission statement. I was curious, so he read it to me, and I just started laughing. He told me that if I thought I could do better, the job was mine. So, I started off by taking what he had, and just crossing out all the meaningless buzzwords. It looked something like this:

-------- --------- --- ---- ----- ----- we ----- ------------- -------
---- --------- -------- --------------- --------- --- ---------- --
----- ------- provide ----- ------ -------------- -------- ---------
----- --------- -- -------- ----------- -------- services -----
------ --------- --------- ------- ---------.

I just handed that back to him. I don't think he got it.

That company didn't last long. Shocker.
posted by majcher at 7:59 AM on August 5, 2003

Crappy writing has infested certain segments of my team. I plan to send a note to them all about this great new tool and suggest they use it. Unfortunately, it doesn't pick out 'position' when used as a verb meaning everything from 'talk about' to 'take a strong stand on' which is the most common offense in these parts.
posted by jacquilynne at 10:10 AM on August 5, 2003