Thursday, July 27, 2017

Words I Don’t Use, Part 2: “Holistic”

The second “word I do not use” is holistic.

When people use the word “holistic” in my industry (Oracle), it means that they’re paying attention to not just an individual subcomponent of a system, but to a whole system, including (I hope) even the people it serves.

But trying to differentiate technology services by saying “we take a holistic view of your system” is about like differentiating myself by saying I’ll wear clothes to work. Saying “holistic” would make it look like I’ve only just recently become aware that optimizing a system’s individual subsystems is not a reliable way to optimize the system itself. This should not be a distinctive revelation.

1 comment:

Jeffrey Kemp said...

"holistic" is a perfect weasel word, plus it makes the speaker sound like they are "in tune" with nature or something like that.

http://dilbert.com/strip/2002-02-05