Euromoney Alternative Awards: The Thinking Outside the Sandbox While Boiling the Ocean Award for Corporate Speak

Euromoney, January 2018

To see the whole Euromoney alternative awards feature click here

There may be no more crowded field in all of finance than corporate doublespeak. Particularly at awards time, Euromoney is festooned with examples of the art: portmanteaus in the creatinnovation style, verbs turned into nouns then back again and endless references to redefining new paradigms.

This is the year, after all, when you were absolutely no one unless you considered yourself an ideator. What you were ideating didn’t really matter – it was the ideating that counted.

If you were an ideator, then you almost certainly had a sandbox. But the point about the sandbox was of course that while you might have it, you were never in it – or at least your thoughts were not. Perish the thought.

It also came as a bit of a surprise to the Euromoney team that in this era of action against climate change, not least from a financial community that has embraced green finance (and the fees, volumes and kudos that go with it), the concept of warming seas could actually be seen as a positive one.  The first time we heard the phrase ‘boiling the ocean’ was during a lunch engagement with a French banker, who had a wonderful turn of phrase, such as “we were not swarming the clients” and “a bunch of my clients are hairier than the bank might necessarily want”.

Apparently it means taking on an impossible task.

It was a pretty hard task to single out one bank for its contribution to corporate-speak this year. But even in the face of vibrant competition, State Bank of India must be acknowledged for its sterling work.

In the presentation of then chairman Arundhati Bhattacharya, which accompanied the bank’s second-quarter results for 2017, alongside now-standard references to hackathons and the like, it includes the heading ‘Platformization’, another heading, ‘Tech-Upgradation’, the (sort of) word ‘virtualization’ and the boldly innovative ‘Intra-preneurship’.

What’s really impressive is that they are all on a single slide.

We are prepared to forgive it, however, for also including the word ‘Meghdoot’. This is an open source cloud offering in India and we think the name derives from the lyric poem ‘Meghaduta’ by the great Sanskrit poet Kalidasa.

Whatever the etymology, Meghdoot is a fine word and we use any opportunity to repeat it.

As for the rest of it…

Full article: https://www.euromoney.com/article/b15ycp8w61676n/alternative-awards-of-the-year-2017#belt?copyrightInfo=true