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?

But throughput isn’t even a word!

The admin team is the glue that keeps the department together

Lets‘s take this off-line

We need that taken care of ‚end to end‘

As someone fairly new to corporate speak, I was in education for 16 years, it always baffles me when I hear deep dives, town halls, all hands etc. A lot of corporate speak just sounds so pretentious, why not just department/team/all staff meeting.

'I'm going to step back from frontline fire fighting and just start leveraging my rolladesk' said several times my the CEO of the start up I worked for.
I could stand it no longer. Everyone spoke like that all the time. I HAD to leave.

Can I play that back to you?

The bottle shapes the water

Flying the plane while we’re still building the engine

We’re here to stop the hole going right through the cheese

All of the above heard just this week

Oh god the fucking retrieval practice! My SLT are OBSESSED with it! We now have to put 'retrieval' at the start of EVERY lesson (and it has to be in books!!). Even art and music has to have a bloody 'retrieval skill'. And every three weeks we have to spend around 20 minutes each for each subject doing a 'Collaborative Retrieval', where the children on each table share a ridiculous group sheet and write bullet points showing what they have learnt 'so far'. It takes ages, (especially lower down the school) as they each have to have 'their turn' on the sodding sheet!

This is one of the MANY educational 'trends' that come and go...like VAK learning styles from years ago which 'came and went'...that SLTs love to jump on without really thinking about how it will add to workload and what effect it has on learning (zero!). Utter bollocks!

We had an all hands once a week, a stand up every morning and a retro every Thursday afternoon. All of these meetings were effectively the same thing.

Haha solidarity! Classic Assistant Head new thingy thing, they have to justify their existence don't they.

I suspect nearly all the examples on here come from managers who aren't that competent and know it, waffling and blustering to try and seem profound.

I went through a bit of an epiphany about 7y ago when I realised a) my students hate all this fashionable educational garbage and b) I'm not being observed 99% of the time, so I just don't do any of it lol and everyone is happy.

Very far from the corporate world but in my line of work we advertise classes and workshops. Many of my (younger) peers now advertise with the venue, the time and "Investment" or "exchange". What in the world is wrong with the word "cost" or even "fee"? I try not to judge, I really do, but inside my head, I hear myself thinking "what a pile of wank!" 😅

Laser focused is the new buzz word.
I make light saber sounds in my head.when I hear it.

We need to remain Laser focused on x

I worked for a big retailer years ago who referred to cross-training its staff across departments as cross-fertilisation.

Cringing with guilt here 😆
Some of these are impossible to avoid when one is part of that herd.
I have worked very hard in my life, uniformed, front line, night work - really making a difference. I now get to send waffly jargon filled emails as a senior manager instead!
I don’t stress too much about it. I know the frontline staff don’t even have time to read their emails…
Sorry. I meant operational grades need a review of our comms strategy so I’ll reach out to key stakeholders to workshop this.

My SLT love “the piece”. I am of Scottish descent so to me it’s a sandwich. Might ask them if they want me to go for the messages.

Also big fans of “reflections” - 10 mins of wittering on at the start of all-staff calls, sorry, town halls. Nobody cares, we’re swamped with work but yeah you just go ahead and indulge your egos.

If you work in the NHS, NHS Blithering blog is complete genius because it’s so terrifyingly accurate https://www.hsj.co.uk/julian-patterson/are-you-an-improvement-warrior/7036467.article

i guarantee someone in the NHS will have used the phrase improvement warrior with a straight face

personal hate phrase atm - imagineer - we’re only limited by our ability to imagineer solutions and not apparently by lack of time, staff or money

also upskilling makes my teeth itch

This reminds me of an interview I went to (National Trust). I was asked a question that was incomprehensible so I asked the interviewer to repeat it. I still didn't know what she was asking me or even have any idea what she was talking about because there was so much corporate jargon involved so I politely asked if she could explain it in plain English. She just came out with a load more twaddle so I told her that I was unable to answer her question because it didn't understand what she was asking. Ironically, the question was about people skills. Needless to say I didn't get the job.

’in this space’ as in ‘I have no expertise in the space’

just say you don’t know something!

Some of these made me laugh. Thankfully there are quite a few I had never heard before.

“Strategise this out”!? you mean think?

“Holistic approach”

“Iterate” this that and the other

“Work in synergy”

It’s just too much 🤣 I barely know what is being said most the time

I've had 36 years of this bullshit, I so need to retire!

Ah yeah, that makes sense.

😉

Genuinely so many but my top ones ' it's in your gift', 'this is a gift' (no, it's more work), 'we need to change the optics'

Sadly it's just as likely to be written by a human. I have an ex-colleague whose LinkedIn is a farrago of that sort of stuff - 'stakeholders' and the like.

Pushing the envelope
The new paradigm, see also paradigm shift
Cadence
Leveraging (just about anything and everything)
Turning the dial / moving the needle
Being 'match fit'

🙄 (I looked for a wanker emoji but , inexplicably, couldn't find one. If I had, it would be here).

My DP works in the corporate world and often from home:

We need to square this one off

Its like learning to swim but without armbands

We are in the direct firing line

You would honestly think they were leading troops into war! Train Guy comes to mind.

T-shirt sizing

No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no no, NO!

Fuck off with your t-shirt sizing and when you get there, fuck off again and don't ever come back.

p.s. it means how much time or effort an task or project will take by giving it a t-shirt size from XS to XXL 🙄