"Failure Laundering"

A colleague of mine slipped this marvellous expression into a conversation today: "failure laundering". It was in the context of an intiative that hadn't delivered and had gone very quiet, but instead of being formally closed it got bundled up into a new initiative. That way it wasn't seen as having failed, but merely reincarnated. Some 'change' management programmes can go on for years like this.

Another observation I rather like on this theme is "we never kill projects, we just wound them severely".