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I'm an acronym hater.
That's right. I hate them. I hate that every time someone creates a new program, they need to give it some convoluted seven word name that just conveniently spells out "ACHIEVE."
I own a company that represents professional speakers, and let me tell you, we have a couple of speakers who just LOVE (lacking originality, void of effort) their acronyms. Leadership speakers are the most guilty. I bet 90-percent of their audience members can't remember a day later whether the "A" stood for attitude, action, acceptance, or aardvarks.
When professional speakers use acronyms, my skin crawls. The only thing that gets me leaving a room sooner is when someone uses the exhausted line, "Webster's defines (whatever) as (whatever)." I'm out the door before they finish the definition. I'm sure that most of those speakers don't even own a Webster's. We had one speaker who was doing a keynote and forgot what his own acronym stood for, during the speech. That's awkward.
This year, you'll be creating all kinds of new programs and projects, and I know the temptation will be to give everything a jazzy acronym name. AVOID (another variation on ineffective development) the temptation. It's old. It's tired.
Sometimes acronyms limit you. You'll give your awesome new project a clever acronym name, because it makes perfect sense now, and years later it will be completely stupid and irrelevant. Imagine back in 1995 you named a campus group "PAGER." How dumb would that be today?
Several years ago, my company created a leadership program called SALAD. Originally, it stood for "Seeking Alliances through Leadership and Diversity." Seemed great for about a year. The visuals of lettuce, tomatoes and cucumbers were a marketing delight. It took us about a year to realize that it really wasn't a "diversity" program, but more of a community building workshop. Unfortunately, we couldn't rename the program SALACB. The program is a huge success, but at least once a week, we have to explain that it's not a diversity program, per se. We've tried to downplay the whole acronym thing for that program for several years, but it's hard to shake.
Sometimes acronyms just confuse the hell out of people. I participated in a program called the Colorado Institute for Leadership Training. That's right: CILT. The leaders pretend that the name isn't problematic, but it is. When people ask me what year I graduated from "CLIT," I tell them, "Sometime during junior year of college."
Then there's the whole thing about periods. Do you use them or not? Is it NAACP, or is it N.A.A.C.P.? (Another great example, by the way, of an organization that had to decide what the hell to do about an acronym name that had become politically incorrect.)
Sometimes acronyms are hard to remember. The Midwest Greek Conference Association (MGCA, never an easy one to remember) recently changed its name to AFLV – The Association for Fraternal Leadership and Values. I love the conference and its leadership team, but I begged them to call it the Fraternal Leadership and Values Association. "FLAVA" would have been so fun to say, and remembering it wouldn't take six minutes.
As much as I hate acronyms, I love nicknames. Why not call CILT, simply "The Institute," or "Leader Camp." Maybe "The G Spot." I don't know... something original. Why couldn't MGCA have become "Greek World Expo" or maybe "Fratapalooza!"
"Where you going this weekend?"
"Fratapalooza."
That would have been super cool.
