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Adapting to doublespeak

Charles Cooper CNET News

Published: 24 Oct 2003 15:30 BST

It was a Kodak moment for the grandkids.

There sat Carly Fiorina, Hewlett-Packard's great communicator, struggling to directly answer an interviewer's request for a crisp definition of the company's "Adaptive Enterprise" strategy.

First it was an "end state." Then it was an "approach." Then it was -- well, it was everything under the sun, moon and the stars -- enough business-babble to reduce even the most hardened McKinsey consultant to a state of dribbling catatonia.

Eventually Fiorina, who was speaking at a Gartner conference earlier this week, allowed that some confusion had emerged since HP took the wraps off its brainstorm last May. Glutton for punishment that I am, I decided to surf the company's Web site and see whether I could find a sharper definition. This is what I learned:

HP's "collaborative approach is tailored to a customer's ecosystem to create adaptive infrastructures that use leading software products and architectures and leverage HP's own expertise in the creation of adaptive infrastructures".

I suppose that's a good thing -- though it beats me what they're jabbering about. Still, the description rates as a perfect paragon of clarity compared with the following:

"The HP Adaptive Infrastructure approach helps companies to synchronise their IT resources, processes and infrastructure with business strategies. This approach enables business to reduce the cost of change, reduce total cost of ownership, simplify management complexity and provide the enterprise with the ability to rapidly implement solutions that provide a competitive advantage. With an HP Adaptive Infrastructure, IT can rapidly adjust to the changes needed by the corporation to meet new business initiatives and opportunities."

While they're at it, why not claim to have discovered a cure for the common cold and to have taken the Nobel Prize for physics?