A lexicon of executive lingo
Nominated by reader Ben Amado, programme director at Citi, as the most pervasive, if not the most irritating of current bizwords ("...it annoyed me initially when I heard it five times in the space of two minutes...") disaggregate sounds agreeably robust, fairly technical and less negative than 'split up', 'tear apart' or 'fundamentally rethink'.
First used, from 1828, in hard science, the term became a key component in strategy consulting and business modelling in the 1980s. Disaggregation used to mean separating out the organisation itself into discrete activities that had been submerged in the whole: to disaggregate — and sometimes to reaggregate — the value-chain became a cliché of corporate strategic thinking. Disaggregate also featured in sectors ranging from property law to e-commerce and became a modish designation for unbundling and outsourcing, divestment of non-core business and the dismantling of cumbersome or outmoded IT networks before, as Ben Amado notes, managing to insert itself into almost every professional conversation.
Send your buzzwords, jargon and new and exotic usages to tony.thorne@kcl.ac.uk
blog comments powered by
