The latest corporate bullshit term I've noticed starting to increase

[StealthPolarBear]

A year ago people used to want meeting 'minutes' or 'notes' .
As of about six months ago I started to hear the term 'meeting read out' and it's on the increase.

I know I'm ancient - but if someone asked what the take away was, I'd probably say chop suey and chips.

I'm Civil Service, but in a relatively small, practical department, so this stuff isn't as widespread as it appears to be elsewhere. You do get the occasionally wanky new manager who's come in from HMRC or similar and wants to deep dive in our meetings, but we tend to knock that out of them by taking the piss (subtly, of course). I once sent a Teams invitation for a "Forward looking horizon scanning brainstorming ideas dump", which I think got the message across.

Slide deck refers to when you had a projector with a set of actual photographic slides in it. I have no idea why this is now used to refer to a PowerPoint.

Civil service is a pain in the arse for buzz words & phrases, funnily enough most of them since the Tories came in to power. Just listen to Boris of the briefings for prime examples.

@franke. I too have seen “concretize” from non native English speakers.I think it’s a mistranslation of “cementing” as in “cementing a relationship”

Nhs here, we don't have meetings anymore.. its bloody huddles!!

@shadypines agile working is not flexible working, and so you can have joy being a pedant and correcting whoever is wanting to be agile.

I once did a little experiment. I heard another wanky company were talking about ‘cliff events’ but I hadn’t heard anyone use it at our place. I ‘premiered’ it a meeting I was running and it is all I heard in the next few months. Made me smug smile every time.

We have old hands thankfully.
Huddles have been and gone they are teas and toast or natters

I dislike lean in - take you elbows off the fucking table please & speak to me like another human being.
Vanilla deal - can't be arsed to check out what the detail is so I will blag it.
Pivots - if we keep doing this the shit will hit the fan & we will end up in the papers.

'Let's dialogue'. WTF is wrong with Let's talk, let's speak, let's chat. I moved back from the US a year ago and really thought I'd heard every buzzword in circulatoin. Apparently not.

We have to tell people about signposting them to advice and support, at work, they never understand what you mean.

Can I also say I hate terminology including “bubbles” “binge” “hun” and “buzzing” or “buzzin”

The “bubbles” person should be shot in all honesty.

Apologies, I didn’t mean to hijack a laudable thread

@dementedma yes, a mistranslation sounds plausible. We did discuss "solidify" as an alternative but they thought it sounded a weird thing to do with a strategy. Whereas "concretize" is perfectly fine

Oh god, so many awful corporate words and phrases - plus is it me or have they been turbo-charged with wfh?

Some of my (not) favourites
Pivot
Deep Dive
Deck and Pack (to refer to a powerpoint)
Granular Detail
Reach Out and Circle Back (someone could make a dance out of that)
C-Suite (vom)

I give you ‘wheelhouse’.

Ugh, yes "c-suite". I heard that for the first time last week.

And so starts another week.

Let's see what corporate bollocks comes up in meetings. After reading this thread, I've got a few to look out for.

What does c-suite mean?

I thought it was just DHs work talking about slide packs instead of PowerPoint. At my work it is still PP thankfully although we still use the occasional fax, so

C suite is the very senior team. The Ceo, Cfo, Coo etc.

I remember the first time I heard the phrase "reach out" in a business context. It was used by a representative of a software vendor who was American based. There was a moment of complete silence as every other person in the room tried desperately to keep a straight face before someone suggested "Or you could...perhaps...email them?"

I confess I've used "pivoting" in the context of Covid changes. But to be fair, when you work in a university managing the systems that allow online learning, the analogy of being the pivot point and being gouged by the ice skater blades described above is entirely appropriate.

C suite is the very senior team. The Ceo, Cfo, Coo etc

That is CRINGE

Dh and I came across c suite for the first time on Saturday. We assumed it was some share point type software until I googled.

C-suite is a very American term in all fairness I think. I agree that Agile and Lean should be used in the proper context. We have to call remote working 'distributed' working now so that it doesnt get confused with agile which is something completely different. Sigh.

There's definitely a frog-boiling element to all this in that you just acclimatise... I remember the first time someone told me that they 'had the team diarised' for a certain date I thought it was hilarious, now it just seems standard.

I found myself non-ironically saying that we needed to 'capacitate' something in a meeting the other day. That was a worrying moment.

I am NHS so I suspect we are 5 years behind the curve... huddles are still very much here. Unescorted what are teas and toasts?? I do hope wankspeak is not about to ruin two of my favourite things!

Everytime I hear the phrase "the optics look bad" I hear my old English teacher saying "Tautology!". The whole phrase can be replaced with "It will".
Corporate speak seems to put an extra layer of verbiage between actions and results, almost as if it makes it easier to distance yourself if things don't work out?

@onewhitewhisker at least you still say "acclimatise" and not "acclimate", there's hope for you yet.
The Plain English Society used to appear in the media campaigning against this sort of thing but they don't seem to be as active as they once were, I hope they haven't given up.