Please Don’t Say It!

A few blogs back I regaled you with anecdotes from several of my former companies who were hopelessly mired in meeting cultures. To recap, I was required to attend meetings for just about everything, including the absurd premise of conducting meetings to determine when to schedule future meetings.

Now in sort of a tangent to that, I’ll address my second least favorite corporate exercise, that of the oft-repeated and grating sphere of buzzwords.

You know what I mean – shopworn clichés and axioms such as “win-win.”

Several years ago, some inventive humorist developed a bingo-style game card to bring to meetings containing all the overused terms of corporate speak. When one of the attendees successfully marked three across, they would yell out a certain term that cannot be printed here, but can be found littering the ground of any livestock pasture.

I once attended a publishing conference and an executive at one of the big print houses whom many suspected was just  Inspector Clouseau in an Armani suit in terms of a skill set, was asked what trends the industry would see in the coming year. In typical fashion he replied, “The companies that can deliver alternative forms of content will gain a win-win for themselves and the readers.”

Translation: Those who have online products in demand by consumers will outperform others who don’t.

That’s a conclusion a junior staff writer could have come to with about 30 seconds of thought on the subject.

So to wit, below are some of the phrases many of you rest assured you’ll encounter at least once in 2014. The irony of it all is that many of these phrases are employed by people who have little or no idea of what they’re talking about but want to sound like they do.

When mulling a new strategy or product – “Let’s think outside the box.”

Or, “What are the pain points here?” “Is it scalable?”

“People, do we have our ducks in a row?”

How about this familiar favorite when there’s some disagreement?

“Let’s take this offline.”

The case of missed revenue a company should be getting but isn’t.

“Folks, this is low-hanging fruit.”

Some others to think about – “value-add,” “synergy” and “at the end of the day.”

And lastly, after a long and drawn out meeting someone will invariably ask, “What are our takeaways?”

Now that one makes my skin crawl.

Oops. I didn’t mean to say that.