What you would normally do with warning people about a fire is say: "get out" It's a really basic human response, "get out, there's a terrible fire coming, run for your lives, words to that effect.

Or there's a prospect this may happen and you won't be able to fight it with your Honda pump. In other words, you would use concrete language. But the CFA has obviously gone through management school and when the commissioner asks them to describe what they did on that day, they begin talking about value adding, we value added, we populated the document. I don't know what that means, still don't know what that means.

They did all sorts of things but they didn't seem to do anything about warning people that the fire was coming. In the end they, in large part failed to do that. Now that's not so to say that management language or abstract nouns caused the deaths of people on Black Saturday. But it is to say that this sort of virus of management language has spread into places where it doesn't belong.

I'm not sure it belongs in management, or in corporate management, but it certainly doesn't belong - it seem to me - in the CFA or an education department or a health department or lots of other places.

read & weep ....

http://www.abc.net.au/7.30/content/2009/s2707638.htm