At the beginning of every year I hand out prizes to companies and individuals who have shown the greatest flair in butchering the English language or in talking through their hats during the previous 12 months.
Every year I observe that the quality of the jargon has been the best yet, but in 2010 it was so outstandingly good it has shifted every paradigm in the book.
Indeed it has even shifted the book itself. Thus my first award in the 2010 Management Guff Awards is a brand new category for Daft New Names for Common Nouns. Ian Freed, vice-president of Amazon Kindle, gets a silver medal for renaming books “reading containers”, but Toyota, which has rebranded the car as a “sustainable mobility solution”, scoops the gold.