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30 more stupid business jargon phrases you’ve absolutely got to stop using

We’ve covered stupid business jargon before on Idealog, but, business being what it is, no sooner had we skewered ‘human capital’ and ‘visioneering’ than a whole slew of new atrocious verbiage appeared to thorn our sides once more.

So here is Idealog’s 30 more stupid business jargon phrases you’ve absolutely got to stop using, your handy guide to the worst of the office waffle, 2016 edition.

The list:

Adhocracy – A management principle whereby nothing is managed

Agreeance – An asinine way of saying ‘we agree’

Best in breed – A fancy way of calling your competition crap

Best practice ­­– Putting on safety goggles

BOHICA ­– An acronym for ‘Bend Over, Here It Comes Again’ (No joke for this one, it’s just awesome)

Blue sky thinking/Next level thinking – Making plans that will never secure a budget to match

Bouncebackability – What we used to call ‘resilience’

Business-provocative – Dressing in a way that shows a bit of boob

Chainsaw consultant – The axe man for the new millennium

Compliment sandwich – The old ‘say two nice things and one mean thing’ trick

Deferred success – A clever way to describe contemporary failure

Dipping your pen in company ink – Buying your meat from the place you make your bread

Disruption – Anything new

Food chain – How people at the top of an organisation’s hierarchy describe the rest of it

Granularity – Detail

Heavy lifting – The work done in a company’s lowest-paid positions

Office culture – The room’s mood at 11pm the night of the Christmas party

Pinging an email ­– Sending an email

Prebuttal – The shutting down of a terrible idea before it’s spoken

Punching the puppy – Doing an unpleasant task for the good of the company

Reach out – To annoy via LinkedIn

Resume stain – A company so terrible they make your CV look guilty by association

Spokesweasels – PR people

Swamped – Tired/lazy

The take away – The 10 seconds of useful information at the end of an otherwise useless meeting

Time poor – Tired/lazy

Turn-key – The kind of software installation experience described in fairy tales

Uptitling – Adopting a creative job title in an attempt to make your unimportant job sound less so

Vision – How six-figure salaries are rationalised

Wiggle room – A benign-sounding term for a disappearing margin

Ready for another 30? Click here

Jonathan has been a writer longer than he cares to remember. Specialising in technology, the arts, and the grand meaning of it all, in his spare time he enjoys reading, playing guitars, and adding to an already wildly overstocked t-shirt collection.

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