A leading group of scientists has claimed today that office radar systems do not exist and cannot be used as a means of determining how up to date colleagues are on future initiatives. The piece of work, commissioned by the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development, is expected to have wide ranging repercussions across workplaces in the UK and further afield. The commonly used phrase, “it’s on my radar”, is favoured particularly by middle managers. “I genuinely thought that my boss was able to see new business and potential issues coming at us from afar, by transmitting and receiving electromagnetic waves. It turns out that this is not the case and I now feel worried about the future, particularly in this difficult economic climate,” said Dean Waters, a sales administrator from Wapping.
Professor Clive Hallams, who led the study, commented, “We didn’t know when we started what our findings would be. It came as quite a surprise when time and again we were unable to detect any radar activity or indeed locate any technology or infrastructure related to radar. Our conclusion was that managers are prone to techno-babble without any foundation whatsoever and that the use of radar is still contained mainly within the armed forces. It is perfectly feasible for a mid-ranking naval officer to say, ‘it’s on my radar’, but in other walks of life this statement has been shown to be incorrect.
CIPD spokesperson Shelly Preece said, “We commissioned this study to highlight the excellence of British businesses in the hope that the findings would promote our managers on the world stage. Unfortunately it has turned out that these radar systems are in fact fictitious which is disappointing. The CIPD is committed to raising the profile of our business community and therefore several other studies are planned. The first of these will be to examine the practise of ‘roadmapping’ which seems to have become very popular in recent years. It is unclear whether this relates to product innovation or use of the AA routefinder service, we hope the study will make this clear. We also hope to understand how many offices actually have a flagpole, how people are able to ‘drive’ a computer demonstration and whether or not companies own the orchards from which they gather ‘low hanging fruit' or whether they are actually scrumping apples illegally.’”
