What's in a (Code) Name?
I occasionally think of this scene from The West Wing:
"NASA's great at naming things," President Bartlet says. "Mercury. Apollo. Atlantis. The Sea of Tranquility. The Ocean of Storms."
He's so right; they really did nail it with those names.
As so often is the case, real life isn't quite as poetic. There's this NPR story from this past fall where the Trump administration's decision to use beloved children's book Charlotte's Web as the name of an immigration sweep in — you guessed it — Charlotte, North Carolina. Or this local news report from Charleston, South Carolina, that recounted many of the administration's crasser operational names: "Operation Dirtbag in Florida. Operation Catahoula Crunch, also known as Swamp Sweep, in Louisiana. Operation Catch of the Day in Maine."
All of this came to mind today as I perused a super interesting dispatch from Ernie Smith over at Tedium on code names that companies use for their products and unsavory downsizing plans, sparked by news item I'd missed: a bungled Amazon mass-firing that was tipped off ahead of time by a too-early email that referred to the firing as "Project Dawn."
Ernie Smith
It inspired Smith's deep dive into code names in general, but especially when "turnaround management" decisions were at play. The whole post is full of these little forgotten (or never known) bits of history, such as when product code names simply became the actual product names and perspective on just how commonly used code names are in corporate culture.
Thoroughly enjoyed such an unexpected detour of scrolling, which is the true joy of the internet.
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