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.
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