Recently I stumbled across this post from Forbes about The Most Annoying, Pretentious And Useless Business Jargon. It’s a fun read for anyone who has spent time in the corporate world, particularly those of us who work in corporate communications and are bombarded by jargon everyday.
Like it or not, corporate meetings and conference calls have become infested with buzzwords. We’ve all experienced it (probably even today!)—the annoying and detrimental rambles of a speaker who wants to appear to being saying something relevant, but in fact has zero meaning behind his statement, like a hack magician fumbling to pull a rabbit out of a seemingly empty hat. But just as any sensible person knows that there is a false bottom in the “magical” hat, we communicators—and I’d like to think most competent business professionals—can spot a cheap trick a mile away and properly view jargon for what it really is—sloppy, imprecise, and lazy.
There are a handful of words that made Forbes’ list that would definitely find their way onto my list of top offenders: “reach out”, “leverage”, “learnings”. I would have added a couple more which consistently strike a dissonant chord with me — “align” and “synergies” are two words that, at a previous job, I’d hear at least three or four times per meeting…often crammed into the same sentence. For example:
“Reach out to So-And-So to align on the initiative to spot potential synergies and leverage best practices.”
Do what?? I surely don’t know and, I bet, neither do you!
The article got me thinking about words/phrases like “best practice” where there’s a specific meaning intended, but due to inaccurate (over)use have become toxic to the ear. It’s kind of like that great new song that finds its way onto every annoying commercial on television. You hear it five times a day–every single day– so that, after awhile, it becomes so overplayed that you grow to despise it.
But it’s not the word’s fault, right? Should we blame the corporate jargon or the person saying it?
So for all you corporate jargon-heads, here’s a solution to help you change your evil ways. You don’t have to look any further than one of my favorite CEC web pages on communicating in a more engaging way. This pages provides answers to questions that we all should be considering when communicating. Questions such as: What words would our audience naturally use to talk about the topic? Is what we are saying relevant and emotionally engaging? How can we express this clearly and concisely? Check out this resource to learn more.
What about you? What words really vex you?
on August 16, 2012
Respond
I , like many of you, sit in meetings thinking “why can’t anybody else see through all of this?”. This is like when children talk to each other in nonsense syllables,except children know it all means nothing. The problem is, our collaborations and stretch goals (arrgh) are all worded using this dialect. The only way to get through it , is to learn and use the same language. Good grief.
on December 27, 2012
Respond
For your reading pleasure, here are some of the meaningless terms my colleagues and I collected this year:
Bake out
Bake in
Bandwidth
Black belt (also see “Kaizen” or “guru”)
Champion (as a verb)
Clear line of sight
Deep dive (in-depth analysis of data or event– see “hot wash”)
Flying the plane while we’re building it (variant of “Adding cars to the train while it’s moving” and “Changing a tire while the car is moving”)
Game changer
Granularity
Hot wash (rapid assessment of data or event – see “deep dive”)
Jump start
Level set
Leverage
Lockdown
Low-hanging fruit
Non-trivial (as in “lack of budget to complete the project is a non-trivial issue”)
Non-zero (as in “this is a major update with a non-zero risk of damage to the system.”)
Plus Delta
Running a marathon at a sprinter’s pace
Shall (can mean “must, may, or should;” used by poor lawyers and people who want to sound smarter than they are)
Solid glide path
Special Sauce
Unique
Verbing nouns (as in “Let’s architect a solution… or incent the workforce… or iterate this quickly.”)
on January 22, 2013
Respond
I have two office lingo faux pas:
1. The word “Again”. Does the audience really need to be told again and again and again? It’s a commonly used filler word but can communicate that either the audience is too ignorant to understand the first time or the speaker is not confident that they only need to say the message once.
2. The use of quotation marks to “emphasize” words. This came from saying things sarcastically and signing quotes. When I see quotes used not to indicate a quote but to emphasize, I generally interpret it to mean the speaker is kidding. If someone writes, “the presentation was “flawless” good work everyone!” I would interpret “flawless” to mean the work was flawed.