"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.
2Ok but hear me out.
We acquired 20 new logos this month!
3Customer success management
1Check out Wierd Al's Mission Statement for a primer
8George Carlin also has a bit of just corporate jargon stapled together to make a short little speech.
5Sweet
1
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.
13I'm fucking mad that I hear many of these every day and ENGLISH IS NOT MY FUCKING MOTHERTONGUE YOU FUCKING FUCKS
15Ping me
4Same, but to be honest.. attempts to migrate some words to your own language can also get very awkward.
5
For some unknown reason the phrase "thought leader" drives me crazy.
16How do you feel about “Leading thought leader”? 🤮
7
Agile and synergize aligned itself into this chat.
17Where's unlock?
2what are “new verticals”? do i even want to know?
12Verticals are industries. I.e, "services" or "wholesale" are verticals.
2They are opportunities for increasing shareholder value through innovative and disruptive market-leading practices.
21🤢🤮
11I mean not necessarily, they could just be ways to expand profit centers by increasing pipeline opportunities through net new MQLs
8
I cannot tell you how many bosses Ive had/ heard say they are going to have a moment of "radical kindness" and then proceed to just RIP into their employees until they cry.
Corporate double speak is wack.
29This sounds quite specific for something you had to experience multiple times. Hope the people are ok and you found something better to work for.
5idk, I know that there are great companies to work for- my sister found a unicorn of a job. Great pay (and hourly), tons of vacation, work from home, a decent amount of travel but not too much (she's in sales for a scientific instrument company), but I have job hopped enough to know that what she has is now becoming the exception. And of course to your point, this is all anecdotal. I'm now self employed and I've never been busier nor happier.
1
I'm in full swing of a job search and I painfully relate to this image
26No way, this is a great reference chart. All the actionables have been curated into one place.
8
We’ll circle back to this next week.
32With actionable deliverables
15
20To move the needle
7
Makes me wanna logout life
19Self-uninstall
10Unsafely eject drive
8
13Alternative title how you know you need to find another place to work
8Grit. 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.
11This shit makes me want to start a cult in the woods so I can live completely isolated from corporate culture bullshit
15I don't understand why business people do this to themselves. I quit working for large organizations in favor of smaller companies that pay less, because at least there's much less of this. It does get unbearable.
66Lingo is a powerful social tool. Once you know to look for it, you see it everywhere.
Some lingo is always necessary for jobs to communicate complex ideas quickly. Everyone has terms and phrases used in their profession that are exclusive to it, as well as some that are exclusive to their workplace. People outside of their job don't know the lingo, those inside do. In this way lingo is a double-edged sword: it eases communication, but creates a social barrier between those in the know and everyone else.
In an increasing number of places this isolating side effect has been used by certain groups as the motivation for them to contrive lingo. For a long time this was largely relegated to cults and other fringe groups that wanted to shore up the feeling of togetherness of the people within and keep them away from outsiders.
The big change was when groups found that by constantly changing the lingo they could induce two other effects: the exclusion of outsiders and exerting control over existing insiders. The MBA/business types are a prime example of this. For people in or seeking to be a part of the group knowing the latest buzzwords is a must, and not knowing them or using outdated ones opens them up to being ostracized. People who are "in" must constantly stay up to date, thus staying attentive to the trends of the group. At the same time people with a casual interest or interaction are actively dissuaded by how often unfamiliar words are used by members of the group.
This sort of weaponized use of lingo is much more widespread these days. Once you see it in this case you can find it in just about every flavor of modern political group and online forum. If you find a group that seems to always be changing its buzzwords, buyer beware.
33The only thing I would disagree on is that lingo is a recent phenomenon. That's just recency bias.
The Catholic Church used Latin at mass from its inception to the mid-20th century, and the oldest Greek versions of the Bible already use some words we simply have never seen anywhere else.
Philosophers have always been a notorious PITA with using existing words or close derivatives of existing words with different meanings, sometimes the lingo is specific to a single author.
And let's not even get into judicial lingo and its very ancient and storied use of disenfranchising the less fortunate who did not speak it and could not afford a lawyer to speak it for them - that is when the court system wasn't in Latin.
Corporate lingo takes more room in our lives as large corporations take up more and more of the economic and political landscape (with some interesting evolutions in form thanks to the influence of Globish). That's it.
9I couldn't understand what you were saying, you didn't use nearly enough lingo, so I translated it.
"Ah, the almighty power of lingo—like the Swiss Army knife of social circles. Once you're hip to the jargon game, it's like spotting Easter eggs in every convo. At work, lingo's the secret sauce for pushing complex ideas through the pipeline fast. But hey, here’s the kicker: it’s like having a VIP pass—you're either in the club or left standing outside.
Now, here's where it gets spicy. Some folks take that lingo and flip the script—they don’t just use it, they manufacture it like a startup cranking out MVPs. Back in the day, this was mostly culty vibes, fringe-y circles looking to get the 'us vs. them' mojo going. But then boom—the suits came in, turned it into a science, and voilà, welcome to Corporate Speak 2.0.
MBA-types are the real MVPs here. Knowing the latest buzzwords is like holding the golden ticket. If you're still rocking last quarter’s vocab, well, tough luck—you’re getting a one-way ticket to Outsider-ville. Gotta keep your buzzword game on point, always watching the trends, or else risk going full 'legacy system.' Meanwhile, casuals who just want to dip a toe in? They're hitting the eject button as soon as they hear 'synergize' for the tenth time.
But hey, it’s not just the corporate world—we've got weaponized lingo all over the place now. Find a group that keeps updating their lingo like it's firmware? Yeah, you might wanna run a virus scan on that one."
15
Description, GIF of a giant pile of tires on fire in a field with lots of black smoke.
14I once got an email from an executive C-level who mentioned adding value at least four times in a single paragraph.
Annoying as hell because the email hardly contained anything of substance.
48I had a business professor who used "value add" constantly, to the point that I still can't hear that 20 years later without cringing. Our final project in his class was something like "look at a business and find a place where you can value add." That was literally all the guidance we got.
5That would be every e-mail from C-level.
34That's the special executive duckspeak.
I've gone from being righteously angry to bored and hopeless hearing the speech of some particularly skilled practitioners.
It's really kind of amazing how this kind of babble can have such an intense emotional impact while textually imparting almost 0 new information.
It's all about the vibes conveyed by the medium. Kind of like how trump talks in a way, come to think of it.
7
The one I hate most: "Art of the Possible".
5
11Fun game to play at "all-hands" meetings: https://www.businessbuzzwordbingo.com/
18To 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
3What’s the worst one on the list and why?
7KPI because I'm tired of having a good thing going, an exec strolls in and decides they don't have time to learn about what we're doing, KPIs get spun up, and then we shift from getting things done well to getting things done in a way that games the KPIs so we don't get fired by said exec whose entire job is to glance over a chart once a month as if that gives him real insight into the team
20"Touch base" in my opinion. It's the weakest, most common justification for meetings that serve little purpose.
12For me, it's not even on the list
"Reach out"
Yous were convinced by a billionaire to use that instead of "contact" or "get in touch" so he could sell more stuff, and also it sounds conceited as fuck; like you're doing someone a favour by contacting them 🤢
8
9gag because It's not even an iFunny watermark.
3
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.
13Everything was a "Game changer" about 5 years ago. But at least you have Slack. We have fucking Teams.
10Whenever I see companies use ERP as an acronym, I can't help but wonder if they're aware of its more general meaning
7'If we take a step back we can truly appreciate the granularity of sentiment in this curated list of words' - someone from HR, probably 🤮
9
