Best in class

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A hapless buzzword that betrays the lineage of most management consultants and those influenced by their way of speaking.

Why would anyone want to be thought of as “best in class”, other than a prize shi-tzu? So for one thing, to describe, say, your own IT platform as “best in class” is to directly associate it with an award-winning pooch, and that may be a fur-ball away from an uncomfortable truth. It is a dog, and pinning a plastic bauble on its collar from the local dog-and-pony show won’t change overwhelming force of honest opinion helf by those poor toilers obliged to work around it every day just to get their alloted jobs done.

For another, it will salt those of us who remember our school days, and were not best in class. By any reckoning, that's twenty-four in twenty-five of us. For we of that unfeted majority, “best in class” meant the dyspraxic lad who routinely had his head stuck down the lavatory, pencils jammed up his nose and his lunch money stolen. That fellow left school a broken figure; pale, wan and with the sparks of bitter resentment kindling a small fire deep in the pits of his sunken eyes.

No-one knows for sure what became of him, but be assured there’s a guy with the same name in every management consulting outfit.