"Everything is a Priority!" Corporate Illiteracy Crisis Deepens
Real Business News Now #9
Sonya Blake, 47, Business Development Manager for Teal, today became the latest corporate consultant to be diagnosed with functional adult illiteracy. Co-workers raised concerns when Sonya appeared confused and agitated when reading Teal’s newly released 2025-26 strategy document.
Onlookers claimed that when presented with the 107-page booklet, Sonya immediately grew frustrated and raised a number of complaints.
“It says here that the product overhaul is the top priority for 2025,” Sonya was heard to say, “How can there be a ‘top’ priority? What about the name tags for the day trip in September? I thought everything was a priority?”
Sonya was then seen to storm into the office of Teal’s General Manager, Mike Wilson, and complain about the lack of importance granted to her proposed company-branded coffee tins, earmarked for implementation in June.
The phenomenon has received long overdue attention from both academics and media in the past few months, owing to the case of John Anderton, a Sales Executive for web aggregator Findly, who reportedly collapsed when an email he sent asking to ‘confirm’ that sales for the next financial year would ‘showcase proven customer engagement’ received a response that outlined that things that haven’t happened yet can’t be confirmed, and to please clarify what he means by engagement.
“Many in the corporate world have taken to issuing mindless sequences of words with no care for each word’s meaning, or surrounding context,” Dr. Alison Patchek of the University of Vancouver said speaking to reporters. “They construct their sentences based wholly on how each word would feel to an outside observer or superior or later prospective employer. Let me give you an example. If you assigned me a task and I said to you, ‘Sure thing,’ you might not really feel a sense of excitement about the response you get. You might not feel you accomplished very much by telling me to do a thing. But if what I told you, ‘That’s so important, I will action this immediately.’ Whether or not getting the heaters painted is important is irrelevant.”
Some have questioned whether the condition is truly a problem. Speaking with Financial World, Steve Bennett, CEO of Morland & Jones placed the majority of the blame on the English language itself, noting that if the language didn’t change, it could have a serious impact on investor confidence going into the next financial year.