I am "deploying" a very silly question, but it could be amusing.
What especially irritating "business" terminology are you subjected to at work?
The one that annoys me most actually is "the enterprise" which apparently makes you sound more dangerous than just "enterprise"
Irregardless of the synergies we find when enhancing our "web 2.0" ubiquitous utilization, enterprise-quality, shovel-ready progressive monetization schemes, we cannot eschew obfuscation assiduously enough.
"Let's take this offline" as if a meeting is "online"
"We'll need to touch base on that."
It just sounds all wrong to me.
Lately, I'm hearing a lot of "ask" as a noun. As in, "What's the ask here?" "My only ask is..." Maddening! The word they're looking for is "request," but apparently they're attempting to economize on syllables. That or they think it sounds cool. Either way it's idiocy.
I was once in an organization that had one of those top level management guru's come in and give classes. One of those /sarcasm on/ enlightened /sarcasm off/ chestnuts that they taught us was that your viewpoint is not necessarily someone else's viewpoint. They did so by changing the verb "see" to a noun and capitalizing it. Since the CEO enthusiastically adopted this change, you had to put up with people saying,
Remember, your See is not my See.
Is This Good for the COMPANY?
Let's leverage our core competencies by forming a cross-functional team that will map-n-gap the requirements. Then, we can implement a preemptive solution that enhances communication both vertically and horizontally in the organization.
I get this a lot, for some reason it drives me up the wall.
Long winded email ending with -
"Can you please advise on this?"
Which I read as:
"I have no idea what I'm doing / I can't be bothered, can you do my work for me?"
This whole discussion is giving me the hives.
I just hate Going Forward so much. Why not just from now on?
Any tech term used incorrectly by someone who refuses to learn..... Don't get me wrong, if someone says something incorrectly because they just don't know but then starts to use the correct terminology then I'm allll good with that. It's the people that say "yeah, ok, whatever..." that get me.
I'm especially fond of "I need more RAM, I don't have enough to store all my pictures / MP3's / Videos" (that shouldn't be on your machine anyway....)
"It is what it is" is getting a little overplayed. But, hey, it is what it is.
"Thinking outside of the box" - really hacks me off.
*pukes
"You can ping me offline."
Why don't you just say, "You can ask me after the meeting."?
NAK
- chaos
Oh, "thought leadership". I'm getting really sick of thought leadership. It wasn't so bad when it was just at work, especially as the company actually has meaningful thought leadership in its field. But when I started having to hear it from annoying noobs in my hobby, it became way too much.
Stop saying that my by boss is Joe Smith but I have a dotted line to someone else! What does that even mean?
Also, I've got people typing re: in the middle of a sentence to mean regarding. I had a college teacher that actually said it in a lecture. Annoying.
"Let's exploit our synergies and be pragmatic with this approach"
"I'll circle back with Sally and get you an answer"
"Let's make sure we have all our ducks in a row"
110%
As in "I'll give it 110%".
Surely that is impossible.
At a meeting, I was trying to come up with a 'nice' way of saying 'the client is too stupid to notice, anyway.'
So, the best I could do was:
"I don't think were adequately exploiting the limited capabilities of our users"
We were discussing merging some major changes into production that would break some functionality for a very short time.
Action Items.
As opposed to what? I have a new assignment: inaction!
Being 'Looped' into an email chain - it's 'sent' or 'copied' there is no loop you brainless fcukwit!
The word "actioned", used instead of "done".
Solutionize, incentivize, ...
"Getting on the same page..."
"Make sure we are all on the same page"
When your boss says...
Spare me now, scold me later
... you know no good will come of this.
"Let's arm them with the information they need."
You're not a general. You're not leading anyone into battle. Also, I'm not exactly sure how anybody informed about last months time reporting data could feel "armed."
"reaching out to"
As in, We're "reaching out to" our clients.
The more you analyze it the less it makes any kind of sense.
"We're all in the same team" Usually applied by a manager to underlings when he wants something done. Normally prefixed by "Come on, let's pull together".
At one place I worked a few years ago they admitted guiltily to using 'Resource', but they did coin 'Wankerspeak' as a phrase to describe this type of language.
Reduce Headcount
Usually used in marketing. As in, "With our system, you'll increase ROI and reduce head count." Synonymous with "Using our stuff means you can fire a bunch of people."
Referring to individuals as "resources."
As if everyone were interchangeable.
Boss - "You are not meeting expectations!"
Me - "What are my expectations?"
Boss - "Those things you are not meeting."
True story and I hate bosses who talk in circles and never give a straight answer.
Opportunity
It's a problem, OK? No amount of euphemizing is going to make it stop being a problem. Now let's stop singing campfire songs about it and come up with a solution (no, not that kind, the kind that the word originally meant).
Calling a person a "backup" to someone else bothers me. Just because I have similar skills and access as someone else does not mean I am a "backup" it means I can do their job if they get hit by a bus. Which leads me to my next favorite. When people say "If you were hit by a bus tomorrow would so and so be able to do this task." Honestly, if I got hit by a bus tomorrow I wouldn't care who picked up my slack.
Not necessarily a phrase, but improper use of blind copying someone on an email makes me want to throw punches.
Engage in a dialogue
Doesn't anyone talk anymore?
Please advise.
This bit of data looked like this yesterday, but today it looks different.
Please advise.
-Joe User
Uh, yep. You're right. It looks different. Hmm. Maybe someone changed it.
It doesn't happen that often, just deal with it.
"Glocal"
"Bandwidth" and/or (Processing) "Cycles" (of a person)
"Challenge" to mean problem
"Methodology" - The science of creating methods?
http://unsuck-it.com/ is a fantastic resource for all of these!
UPDATE
"Industry Leader" has been so overused by no-name nobody companies with 0% market share that is means exactly nothing*.
(* Unless, of course, the industry you're leading consists of only companies in your business sharing your exact company name. So, an industry of one.)
"Facilitate" and "leverage".
We always are checking how to "leverage" people or resources. Why can't we say "use"? Contact?
"how can we facilitate better monitoring?"
Blah.
You know, all the jargon is simply business shorthand. Some of it, annoying as it is, becomes unambiguous shorthand, which is not a bad thing in the business area. Every profession has jargon; why is it that only business-related jargon gets picked on? Some of it is useful.
That said, a lot of it above is really, really annoying. Hey, I answered my own question!
We've got some "customers" that want this.... Since when did USERS at a university become "customers" for services that they pay nothing for.
"We should schedule a meeting to discuss this." I've found that the meeting/work ratio increases exponentially with the size of the company. It's like Brooke's Law for management.
Anything including the word heuristic in a business sense or utilize in any sense. It has been a long, long time since I've heard someone say "utilize" when it added anything beyond "use."
I spent a lot of time in testing, and one project manager would always use sanitize as a verb form of "run sanity test". Every time he asked us to sanitize a build, I felt like a sanitation engineer... especially since I was working with garbage most of the time.
All great stuff, but let's not throw out the baby with the bathwater. You need to sync your core values with this crowdsourcing. Then, ballpark the best practices and ensure this allows for adequate professional enrichment.
My boss likes copying everyone else around him, but always tends to screw it up... he once heard someone say, "Talk is cheap; it takes money to buy whiskey." (Not sure what that's supposed to mean anyway).
His version when he tried it out was, "Whiskey is cheap, it takes money to, uh...buy... " At that point he confused himself and moved on. It's something like this everyday.
+1 for the "Please Advise" mentioned elsewhere... I have to stop myself from strangling the nearest passerby when I read that in an email.
Me: the strategic enterprise deployment phase is coming to an end, to be followed by the strategic enterprise pre-production phase
Boss: yes. which in turn will be followed by full-scale enterprise deployment
me: entering the first phase of its product lifecycle.
Boss: we're stepping up to the plate, having brought a lot to the table
me: better buckle down and pull yourself up by the bootstraps because theres a long road ahead.
Boss: yeah, but we're swinging for the fences while everyone's way out in the left field. right off the bat, we play hardball.
This was a sarcastic exchange, but I thought it was entirely appropriate.
Long winded email that offers nothing concrete. Pure fluff. End it with "thoughts?"
Robust. Arrrrgh $#^&!#$^& robust. It gets tossed out there as a meaningless descriptor without pointing to definitive qualities or facts. It is a favorite term of executives that are caught unprepared and need to justify something without committing to it. This word should be stricken from the English language for how much it gets abused.
including, but not limited to
It's redundant lawyer-speak. Don't use it. "Including" is sufficient.
Best Practices
OK, what is a desirable procedure that is not a "best practice" called? Never mind - I don't care - just give me all your mediocre practices. I'll throw them against the wall and see what sticks. Then you can run them up the flagpole and see who salutes.
When someone who doesn't realize he has absolutely no understanding of your field of expertise wants you to implement something that would be an enormous drain on manpower / infrastructure / financial resources or just impossible they usually preface their simplistic yet totally impractical request with "It's merely a case of..."
... and about anything that's on the cover of Network World or InfoWeek.
Any sports analogy makes me want to run. Recursion here is unintentional. Once someone starts saying "Its like football, if we drop the ball, its how quickly we pick it up ..", meanwhile I'm thinking "Why did you not stay sober on the eve of signing a new client and see my email saying we can't do that in three weeks? Aren't football players sober??"
You don't need a sports analogy to say "We look really bad right now, please help me fix that".
Then there is the 'we', when they really meant to say I look really bad right now and we expect you to fix that.
I love sales people.
I absolutely loathe the phrase "World Class".
What these tools don't realize is that the second I (along with my fellow co-workers) hear a sales or management Johnny use any of this vernacular we immediately tag them as a DB and disregard anything else they have to say. Luckily I work at a place where we can call out our bosses and other employees for use of such language.
We need a proactive synergistic approach to our methodology.
"Be proactive!"
Isn't "be active" enough?
Learnings
If there's one takeaway from this offline, it's that we can leverage our learnings to empower our enterprise synergies going forward.
"Firing", "shooting", or, worst of all, "flicking" an email.
This doesn't classify as an "enterprise" word, but being a network administrator I absolutely hate the assumption that everything is a network problem.
"Well citrix isn't connecting but everything else works fine, make a ticket with the LAN/WAN group that they have an outage"
or
"Outlook won't connect but I'm using my file shares, and the internet. The network is broken"
So many hours wasted proving it isn't a network problem.
edit: Hah that reminds me of one - "I'll ping Bob about that" - When did ping become a word to encompass email/call?
A great one I've been hearing lately:
Me: So what exactly do you need to have backed up from the server that's been decommissioned for three months before I wipe the hard drive?
User: I don't know.
Me: So you don't know of anything you still need that you haven't needed in three month's time? So you need it backed up in case you don't need it?
User: I don't know what I don't know.
Ahh, if it didn't make me want to scream I might actually giggle...
"Fast Paced Work Environment"
I find all of the feel good jargon of the office place irritating. Seems everything these days is sculpted from a cheezy motivational poster. This is a nice way the spray eu de toilette all over "We are going to work you into the ground, ruin your marriage, erode your quality of life"
All I can say is "In God we trust.... All others pay cash!"
"The reality is..."
Really? In a postmodern culture this is meaningless and annoying, if not a sign of pomposity.
//spk
While we're on the topic, the most lovely compilation/parody of these sorts of phrases that I know of is the Jonathan Coulton song re: Your Brains [1].
[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BjMiDZIY1bMWhen push comes to shove
Grrr!
About everything that is generated by the " Web Economy Bullshit Generator [1]", a "fantastic tool to study modern rhetorical emptiness".
[1] http://www.dack.com/web/bullshit.html"If I could write the script..."
"We need to define our patterns, practices and procedures..."
Makes my blood boil.
Empowerment of stakeholders...
Use of the word "we" when someone clears means "you" -
Colleague: "We really need to get these servers up and running in production before the weekend."
Me: "Mmm..." (Anticipating a 12 hour shift in the datacentre...)
(I know I will have to give in but I will make them work for it!)
If you could just go ahead and list your favourite Enterprise speak annoyances, that'd be great....
:-)
Not exactly business terminology... but I hear these two way too much: "Monday morning quarterback" and "Throw him under the bus".
ok, this has nothing to do with tech terms, but when people refer to the Sept 11 tragedy as 'nine-one-one'...its 'NINE-ELEVEN'...the date...NOT the emergency number.
Again, 'nine-one-one' is the number you call for emergency services
and
'Nine-eleven' is the term used to describe the Sept 11 tragedy.
"Going from strength to strength". I'm not sure why, it just rubs me the wrong way.
Having done technical support, one of my most dreaded terms is "time capsule" when referring to the hourglass. Along the same line, someone in my enterprise discovered that when an application was not responding, that it was actually "clocking"... we dont know what it's clocking, but that's what they're calling it... clocking.