James Moore: Everything you don't want when naming your company

Outlook Today's award for stating the bleedin' obvious goes to Olaf Swantee, the chief executive of (ahem) Everything Everywhere, the communications giant created from the merger of Orange and T-Mobile.

Mr Swantee has been quoted as saying that the aforementioned name is "silly" (although surprise, surprise the comment was supposedly taken out of context).

Actually silly is probably an understatement. Everything Everywhere is what you get when you put a bunch of people with fancy titles, fancy brains and fancy degrees and MBAs from fancy institutions together. They'll generate a lot of ideas for you, some of which will inevitably be rather daft. The trouble is, if you get someone with power buying into one of the daft, sorry, silly ones you can oh so easily get stuck with it.

That's especially the case in corporate cultures where speaking common sense, like saying "this is really, really stupid", can be construed as being "negative" and get you shown the door.

But Mr Swantee should be reassured. It's not just his business. This sort of thing happens, well, everywhere.