Best in class
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Lingo update
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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 associate it with an award-winning canine, 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 the overwhelming force of honest opinion held by the poor, tired, huddled masses who must work around it every day just to put food upon the family table.
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 whose head we routinely stuck down the lavatory, who had pencils jammed up his nose and his lunch money stolen. That fellow might have left school a dux, but he was 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 there’s certain to be a guy with the same name in every management consulting outfit.