My least favourite was my company motto of "Personal, Simple, Brilliant." It was supposed to be an ethos that ran through the whole company. It was actually just what management expected front line workers to be towards customers, regardless of whether the business leaders were making decisions to screw over the customer and the front line staff or not.
The amount of times I asked for support only to be shot down and laughed at when I told them "Well, that doesn't sound very personal, simple or brilliant to me." when speaking of their management culture.
The difference between people who just talk and the people who do.
I confess that I’m 25 years into my career field and I still don’t “get” “OKR” and “PKI”.
I know what the acronyms mean and have looked at definitions dozens of times. But, when I see them in practice, I figure that there’s something I’m still missing—some arcane knowledge only revealed to project managers and executives—because they’re always somehow nonsensical to the business, like someone filled in a Mad Lib.
Since this is giving me Don Beveridge vibes (R.I.P), I remember when RedLetterMedia's Best of the Worst Black Spine edition had his customization seminar on their first episode.
They were laughing and thinking he was some kind of lunatic conman for all of the supposedly nonsense things he was spouting about pushing whopper buttons and deficiencies of PK and a bunch of other stuff, and I'm just sitting back thinking "nope...I understand every word he's saying." Because not only do I have to live currently in an environment where my upper managers emails are filled with such nonsense, but my first job was AT Burger King when I was 16 in 1992 and guess what...
THEY HAD A LITERAL WHOPPER BUTTON!
It was used by management to tell the staff when to keep more burgers in the warming tray and when to lower the supply based on customer traffic. They implemented it because..."75% of the time the Whopper was being served cold"
"Push the Whopper Button" is shorthand for being efficient with when and where you're spending your resources so that your not wasting them where you don't have to and not having them available when you do.
"challenges and opportunities"
"go-dos"
"non-negotiable"
Honorable mentions: “source of truth” and “sanity check”.
You forgot "Digital Transformation"
This shit makes me want to start a cult in the woods so I can live completely isolated from corporate culture bullshit
Fun game to play at "all-hands" meetings: https://www.businessbuzzwordbingo.com/
"Deficiency of PK"
HIT THE WHOPPER BUTTON!
The best thing I ever did was get out of a job/career in an industry that bought into that cult nonspeak. Anytime i hear that stuff anymore, I think of this Weird Al song.
Grit. I worked at a massive tech company that found this one and it was fucking everywhere. I don't mind the basic concept of it, but it was just in every conversation for like 2+ years.
Weaponized language
"Actionable insights" is the opposite of these corpo buzzwords.
It's a phrase I use to shut down clients when they ask for something that doesn't have value. Also know as interesting but not actionable. I prioritize my time on finding actionable insights. Data that can drive decisions.
I'm a particular fan of "power networking"
Alternative title how you know you need to find another place to work
Everything was a "Game changer" about 5 years ago. But at least you have Slack. We have fucking Teams.
'If we take a step back we can truly appreciate the granularity of sentiment in this curated list of words' - someone from HR, probably 🤮
Get into the damn think tank!
The one I hate most: "Art of the Possible".
Customer success management
To be fair, Game Changer was a great strain. Very creative, me an a bud enjoyed some an launched into DND world building for an hour an a half
Where's unlock?
