Corporate chit chat - tell me the worst twaddle

[Changingplace]

I’m soon to be leaving a very corporate role, one of the reasons I need to leave is the insufferable corporate nonsense people talk, I don’t mean industry specific jargon but actual claptrap, the final straw for me was a man announcing they’d need to ‘respray’ some staff 🤣😆

I assume he meant retrain, ffs why do people do this? Do they think it makes them sound clever? It really doesn’t 😂

Whats the silliest corporate twaddle you’ve had the misfortune of hearing?

We don't just do anything anymore, we do it "as a collective". Drives me batshit.

I work in a sales environment. A recent one was we need to 'eat their lunch' (ie win some business off our competitors)

It made me feel sick 🤢

My super duper enthusiastic just graduated from the university of left wing shite, told me off in our first 1-1 for being negative about performance management in front of my junior colleagues who were "on a journey"

Let's take this offline. No. I want to discuss this in an open forum not be fobbed off with shit excuses in secret.

I stopped listening in the 90s when it was all ' blue sky thinking' and 'going forward'..was happy to leave the corporate world 10 years later.

It’s all about ‘pace’ at the moment! Load of shite.

In IT, and being told we need to work "Wagile" - a combo of waterfall and agile that always ends up being the worst of both worlds. It inevitably means we can't react quick enough to urgent business changes, but nor can we deliver projects within the timescales that are inflicted on us.

Someone started saying "crisp point" in a meeting last year. I presumed they meant "crouch point" but then others started copying him. By the end of the year the whole SLT were saying "crisp point" and I was chewing my tongue in meetings.

I give you .... thought leadership.

Education - the latest at our school is a 'diet check'. Many would think this is looking at school meals, it's actually where someone follows a kid to each lesson to see what their day of learning is like. The concept is useful, the jargon is not.

Trianguate. Particularly when this involves bringing more than 3 things together.

Holistic. Everything is holistic. I'm not even sure they know what that word actually means...

Surely The Four Tops?? 😄

All of these are awful.

I've never heard "respray" before but it sounds like something Phil Mitchell would do to one of his dodgy motors.

When we got a new IT system it apparently had a "soft launch". Ffs.

Does that make sense? Does that make sense? Does that make sense?

How about this job advert I spotted on LinkedIn today?

TBF they couldn't really advertise "sitting in your pants mindlessly inputting never ending information you don't understand onto a database for reasons unclear while your flatmate eats that nice cheese, for minimum wage, until you die".

Boil the ocean
Disruptors
Core competency
Capture your colleagues
All hands on deck

A bit different. We sadly had a suicide recently and before it had even been reported our MD stated: I encourage everyone who knew (name) not to dwell for too long on the tragedy of yesterday. Sadly we can't bring him back however much we might wish too.

Sorry- don't dwell for too long on a long term friend and colleague?! The fact this happened YESTERDAY?!

Absolutely unbelievable how peoples private lives are just publicly thrown around to an audience of 500 staff. Also shows the non sensitive attitude towards MH in the workplace. Not the first suicide (around 4-5 in the last 8 ish years!)

How can I best lend energy to this?

Which I think means "oh well done you've had a good idea, how can I pretend I'm doing something to help so I can take some credit"

We need to work on this in sprints.

Which means drop everything else and put in some crazy hours on this.

Surely that's written by AI?

I once worked for a company that pressured us to be more 'customer intimate'. I was listening to the 'my dad wrote a porno' podcast around that time, and had images of corporate orgies and such likes 🤢😂

We might need to take the hit on this one.
I’ll do a deep dive and pull a report.
Its all hands on deck today.
Thank you for reaching out.
Can we get our actionable items out today.
Let’s touch base on Monday about that.
I will need an update by close of play today.
Moving forward.
My door is always open ( it’s not though!).
Its a systems issue.

And of course we can’t forget the most dreaded one:

KPI 😝

This !!! Sick of hearing the word 'pace'
And another phrase that suddenly keeps popping up 'boulders on the runway'

I hate it too. I'm a trustee for a company, and at one meeting all their staff kept talking about their 'piece.' It came up dozens of times. I was so confused