This statement was meant to inform the wider world about the group's strategy under its recently appointed chairman.
My bad, let me rephrase that in the comforting lingo of business-speak. The objective was to provide stakeholders visibility of the group's strategy for sustainable growth and transformation going forward under the new leadership.
What have you deduced about group strategy from the statement? Let's consider each point.
a) That group companies are going to be "nurtured" (in case you thought they were going to be neglected). How? Why "by leveraging the parenting advantage of the group centre" of course! Huh? That sentence becomes a little less opaque only if you know that this group operates through a mega-holding company ("group centre"), peopled by formidable grey eminences, that determines the broad strategic direction under which the various companies operate (that's the "parenting advantage" that is being "leveraged").
b) This Orwellian-sounding "group centre" oversees a wide variety of businesses from hotels to infrastructure. Naturally, it wants to see how far it can get these companies to collaborate to control costs, exchange ideas and expertise (that is, "harnessing synergies"), and generally make more money ("maximise performance").
c) "Optimising" suggests the "group centre" may decide to sell or cut the group's unprofitable or no-growth businesses so that it can concentrate on the profitable ones ("sustained future performance").
Once you decode this dense 58-word statement you realise that behind all the leveraging, optimising, nurturing, parenting and maximising, the new chairman broadly plans to continue on the same lines as his predecessor, the one who actually put the "group centre" firmly at the epicentre of things. Maybe the details will differ and the new chief will find new "synergies" and "optimise" businesses that his predecessor hadn't.
There is nothing wrong with such a decision - why tinker with strategy that has stood the group in good stead. It is the statement that is worth attention because it says a lot to camouflage the fact that it is saying little. Having raised verbosity and cliche to an art form, it is a handy representative of the curious patois that has developed in the corporate world in which communication is all about cliche.
This is the curious point. Literature churned out by the ever-growing tribe of management experts insists that innovation, which they like to call "thinking out of the box", "transparency" and simplicity are listed among the key attributes to corporate success. Yet the clunky, formulaic and fiendishly complex prose companies choose to adopt is the opposite of these values.
The corporate world, thus, is perpetually optimising, synergising, maximising, transforming, downsizing, interacting (holding meetings or discussions), communicating (writing letters, emails, text messages), initiating (starting something) and going forward (a future tense that could mean anything from the next day to the next decade). While they're about it, they also reach "inflexion points" while "bringing ideas to the table" for "sustainable advantage", even if no one's "on the same page" and there's no "visibility" on the "timeline" in the "industry space".
To this global corporate vocabulary India has its unique contributions: "upgradation", which refers to anything that's being upgraded, "corporates" (as a noun) to describe companies or corporations, prepone (wonderful invention, this) to indicate an advancement and "invite" for invitation. Indian companies also frequently "expedite" decisions, "do the needful" and spend time "envisaging" things like "future scenarios" for "end-users" (aka consumers, buyers).
Much of this abusage has crept into the English business papers. Most dailies reproduced the statement at the start of this piece verbatim, perhaps because the reporter and desk editor concerned lacked the time to unpack it.
Still, I can't see corp comm departments changing anytime soon. Like all communities, execs relate to this language and it's a good way of disguising realities. Consider the expert advice below to non-profits on crafting a Mission Statement, something most corporations like to do even if we know they're around only to make money. This expert provides two examples:
"1. We provide food to six area agencies. Feeding programs which collectively serve over one thousand meals per day to the hungry.
2. Our feeding program to the hungry sustains health, good nutrition, energy, human dignity, and the opportunity for individuals to meet their full potential."
The expert asks: if you were a donor to The Golden Harvest Food Bank (GHFB), which mission statement example would give you the most satisfaction regarding the food bank's use of your money?
He chooses number 2. "You need only to observe that one merely provides the 'means' for the GHFB to carry out its mission, while the second IS the mission, as it clearly proclaims the 'ends' - the organisation's reason for being," he says.
Question: how on earth can GHFB assume that that its feeding programme can achieve all the things it claims in statement 2? Ah, but statement 2 has all the soothing key words and phrases associated with a non-profit. Me, I'd rather put my money on a non-profit that truthfully tells you what it does.