Which buzzword annoys you the most? 14 (and counting) of the most irritating business cliches
The first few times you hear these terms and phrases they might sound cool. But the road to pretentiousness can be a very short trip.
Cool, trendy terms and phrases can make people sound pretty smart... until they don't.
Once everyone starts to use a particular term or phrase -- especially in a way that term wasn't originally intended -- it turns into a buzzword. Then it loses its meaning and impact.
Then you just sound pretentious. Or too cool for the room. Or --something that has definitely been true in my case -- kind of silly.
The following is from Steve Blakeman, an advertising and communications expert, a 2015 LinkedIn "Top Voice" for Marketing & Social, and the author of How to be a Top 10 Writer on LinkedIn.
Here's Steve:
"We can't boil the ocean by drinking Kool-Aid and then circle back when we try to run it up the flagpole."
Absolute nonsense right? So why do we insist on using these irritating, confusing and largely meaningless business phrases when we are conversing with our work colleagues?
Come on, lets be honest, we are all culpable of utilizing at least some of these clichd expressions at work from time to time. It does strike me though that their prevalence has been accelerating of late as we appear to be either resurrecting some phrases from the past or (even worse) starting to incorporate language from the digital world into our corporate conversations.
I wrote an article about this very subject back in January this year and was approached by fellow author Mike Adams (check out his book The Intrepid CEO) who had a rather splendid idea: let's write a book about the most despised business BS phrases along with a brief explanation of their meaning and also (if possible) the derivation of the expression.
Then we decided to take the notion one step further. Rather than rely upon our own limited knowledge of these frightful idioms, we came up with the idea to crowdsource as many as we could.
And that's where you come in. If you want to feature in the book, simply send a LinkedIn message to either myself or Mike with your chosen phrase, an explanation of what it means, the reasons why you loathe it and any information you have about where/how it came into being.
If you supply us with an expression which we currently don't have in our existing list we promise you three things:
We will guarantee that your phrase will be featured in the book
You will get your name in the book as a contributor
When the book is published, we will send you a free copy
To get you started, here's a summary of some of the business BS phrases we despise the most:2. 4. 5.
The 14 most annoying business cliches:
Now it's your turn. That's our list of the worst business utterances. So come on then, we have "tee'd it up" for you, so "bite the bullet" and "open the kimono" and share your least favorite buzzwords.
We look forward to reading your contributions and will let you know ASAP if you will be featured in the upcoming book.
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