user: Cadillac Has a Timeline for Its Turnaround Plan
Cadillac, General Motors’ gm luxury brand, is targeting an 11% operating margin in 10 years, Cadillac president Johan de Nysschen said on Monday in an interview with Reuters, laying out a timeline for the long-term turnaround of the brand.

“We’ve got about a 10-year runway to get this brand to where it is making the kind of overall contributions to General Motors profitability that Mary [GM global CEO Mary Barra] expects from it,” he said at the Beijing autoshow.

He declined to give incremental contributions of Cadillac to GM profits before the 10-year mark.

De Nysschen’s remarks reflect the broad leeway he has been given to reinvigorate the Cadillac brand after leaving Nissan’s Infiniti to take over leadership for the U.S. brand in 2014, including moving the brand’s headquarters from Detroit to posh offices in New York’s Soho.

Cadillac has fallen behind German luxury competitors such as Volkswagen’s Audi and Daimler’s Mercedes in the U.S. market, also trailing them in China after a relatively late entry to the country.

Cadillac is targeting 25% growth in China to sell more than 100,000 vehicles this year.
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As it fights to compete with Audi and Mercedes
One man's crusade to banish business buzzwords
If the last email a colleague sent to you talked about mission-critical, blue sky thinking on actionable ways to build bandwidth (the human kind), and, net net, the author thinks he or she nailed it by giving it 110%, you may have found yourself cringing, bewildered, or some combination of the two.

Just for fun, type the offending sentences into the blank field at Buzzsaw — right under “Buzzword of the day” — and hit the button that says “Buzz it.” The paragraph you get back will be run through with red lines that strike out all seven of those annoying clichés.

“Anyone can use it,” says Hamish Thompson, managing director of London public-relations firm Houston PR, which works with some huge global brands including Disney Stores, Del Monte, and Wal-Mart — although Buzzsaw’s original intent was “to make life more bearable for Britain’s hardworking journalists.”

Thompson built the online tool early last year. First, he contacted about 5,000 reporters in the U.K. to ask for the most jargon-ridden press releases they had seen. Hundreds poured in, from which Thompson and his team extracted the offending words and phrases. They then added some from their own research — partly from scouring social media for “cutesy Hipster-style words and phrases like ‘totes amazeballs’ and ‘super-excited,’” the website says — to develop a database of expressions that Buzzsaw can identify and purge. “We’ve cleansed more than 30,000 press releases of dubious English in the past two years,” says Thompson.

It’s no coincidence that a PR firm came up with this. “The job of PR is communicating messages clearly,” says Thompson. “Jargon and buzzwords just get in the way.” Often, he notes, PR workers add puffy language to “make things seem more interesting or grander than they really are. Yet no one is fooled. You can call yourself ‘the global leader in adhesive labeling solutions,’ but everyone knows that just means you sell stickers.”

The irony, in Thompson’s view, is that “plain speech, without all the excess flannel, is much more likely to get people’s attention” — if only because it’s become so rare.

Thompson says his firm has sent the link to about 3,500 corporate PR people, who use it “to resolve some tricky political situations.” When CEOs and other honchos insist on overinflated language in announcements or speeches, a piece of prose that comes back from Buzzsaw riddled with red lines “gives the PR people an objective, third-party opinion” that can persuade higher-ups to let out some of the hot air.

Some of the jargon currently on Buzzsaw’s blacklist is all too familiar on both sides of the Atlantic — like “back-of-the-envelope,” “core competency,” and the dreaded “solutions” (when used to make a potentially clear idea as vague as possible). Other buzzwords, like the Britishisms “Happy Bunny” and “snackable content,” are less common in the U.S. Thompson’s team is now working on building an American database before launching in the U.S. later this year.

Got a worn-out phrase or two you’d like to see included? Thompson is gathering contributions now, by email: buzzwords@houstonpr.co.uk. At the end of the day, it just might be a win-win.
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If cliches and jargon at work set your teeth on edge, take heart. Hamish Thompson feels your pain, and he has developed a tool to address the problem.
No Tweets, Instagrams, iPhones at the Olympics, authorities declare
The 2014 Olympics might feel more like 1914.

Journalists attending the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics in Russia will be forbidden from using everyday technology to take pictures and share information -- the mobile phones and tablets that have woven themselves into the fabric of daily life, the Olympics committee said.

“Journalists using mobile phones to film athletes or spectators will be considered a serious violation and will result in cancellation of accreditation,” Vasily Konov, head of the state-run R-Sport news agency, which controls accreditation at February’s games, told a seminar for sports journalists.

That means no iPhone pictures, no Vine videos, no Instagram accounts sharing the minute-by-minute details of the events, no Twitter accounts with updates and so on.

According to Russian news site Svoboda, the ban will including all mobile devices and tablets, including iPhones and iPads. Fans may be banned from carrying in professional camera gear as well.

Several journalists have already fallen foul of strict accreditation regulations surrounding the Olympics, Buzzfeed reported Monday, including Dutch journalists working on a multimedia project and a Norwegian TV crew.
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Journalists attending the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics will be forbidden from using everyday technology to take pictures and share information, the Olympics committee said.
Washington Redskins land No. 2 pick from St. Louis Rams
The Washington Redskins apparently are determined to solve their long-time quarterback problem.

The team has agreed to send three first-round picks and a second-round pick to the St. Louis Rams in exchange for the No. 2 selection in next month's draft, the Rams confirmed according to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. The deal was first reported by FoxSports.com.

The move cannot be finalized until the start of the new league year, which begins next Tuesday at 4 p.m. ET.

The Indianapolis Colts are expected to take Andrew Luck with the first overall pick, setting up the Redskins to take Baylor quarterback Robert Griffin III.

The Rams, who are committed to quarterback Sam Bradford, the first pick in 2010, will get the Redskins' No. 6 pick and second-round selection this year and two future first-round picks. St. Louis now has the sixth, 33rd and 39th picks in this year's draft.

The Cleveland Browns, with the fourth and 22nd picks, had also expressed interest in moving up to the second spot.

Less than 24 hours earlier, ESPN radio in Washington reported that the Redskins had been told quarterback Peyton Manning would not consider signing with the team.

The Redskins went 5-11 last season with quarterbacks Rex Grossman and John Beck. They haven't take a quarterback this high in the draft since selecting Heath Shuler third overall in 1994.
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assistant: Team will likely draft Robert Griffin III after dealing three first-round picks and a second-rounder.