Annoying Corporate Buzzwords: Revisited

One of our most popular posts remains the one about corporate buzzwords to avoid – you all know them, they make you cringe, you hear others say them and you promise yourself that you will never be one of those people who say things like “reach out” and “leverage” and “double down”….but, to the best of your intentions, you find yourself slip sooner or later.

We’re revisiting this topic based on an interesting recent article in the Wall Street Journal with a new list of culprits to ban in 2014. This article polled business executives and CEOs on the words they would ban from boardroom and office conversations, and here are some of their picks:

“Push the envelope” – Did you know that this phrase originated from test pilots whose job during World War II was to push the limits of speed and altitude?

“De-layering” – Banned for its negative connotation as a euphemism for layoffs.

“Dynamic resilience” – Huh? Yeah, I’m lost too. I guess we can blame the sluggish global economy for this one.

“Passionate” – Raise your hand if you have this on your resume/CV… Now might be a good time to remove it. To quote Peter Cappelli (director of Wharton School’s Center for Human Resources) from the article, “do you want passion in a typical workplace? Isn’t that a lot like drama?”

“Out-of-the-box thinking” – Lisa Goldenberg, president of Delaware Steel Co. of Pennsylvania, makes a great point here: if you see the box, then you’re not really innovating or thinking creatively.

“Viral” – The proliferation of social media outlets has made viral part of our everyday vocabulary, no matter what the viral thing is.

“Associates and Team Members” – Two fancier ways of saying ‘employees’.

What other words and phrases are on your ban list? Please share in the comments!

Here are a few more that got honourable mention in the Wall Street Journal article:

Big data
Going forward
Low-hanging fruit
Disrupt
Epic
Ideate
Incentivize
Learnings
Game change
Reach out (uh-oh…guilty of this myself)

Note: This post was originally written by Arlinda Mezini for our sister program, the CEB Communications Leadership Council. You can read the original here.