Jargon

Words bandied about in business and their meanings

Backfill

After someone has been sacked – sorry, “transitioned” – they tend to leave a person-shaped hole in the landscape. it means “replacement” or “replace”, eg: “We are recruiting for Tom’s backfill” or “We will have to backfill Richard.”

Change agent

The received wisdom in both business and self-help is that change is always good, which of course is rubbish. Change is often extremely bad. Yet you cannot be a modern, thrusting executive unless you are a “change agent”, daringly leading whatever change it happens to be. Otherwise you are an enemy of change.

Close of play

The curious strain of kiddy-talk in bureaucratese perhaps stems from a hope that infantilised workers are more docile. A manager who tells you to do something by end of play or by close of play – in other words, today.

Deck

People are increasingly annoying one another by asking for the “deck” when it comes to a particular Powerpoint presentation, as though they are card sharks in a New Orleans saloon. Can’t you just say “file” or “slides”?

Drill down

Far be it from me to suggest that managers prefer metaphors that evoke huge pieces of machinery, but why else say drill down if you just mean “look at in detail”?

Expectations

managing expectations usually means something more outward-facing and defeatist: preparing your clients or customers psychologically for the inevitable fact that the “deliverables” will be rubbish.

Flagpole, run this up the

Let’s run this up the flagpole! Using this exhortation to mean “give it a try” or “test it”. Later variations on the theme include: “Let’s cross the sidewalk and see what the view looks like from over there”, or “Let’s put it on the radiator and see if it melts”, or even (so I am assured) “Let’s knife-and-fork it and see what comes out”. (Comes out from where? That’s disgusting.)

Going forward

This IS A now-ubiquitous way of saying “from now on” or “in future”. It has the added sly rhetorical aim of wiping clean the slate of the past; indeed, it is a kind of incantation or threat aimed at shutting down conversation about whatever bad thing has happened.

Heads-up

“I just wanted to give you a heads-up on …” is now the correctly breath-wasting way to say “I just wanted to tell you about …”.

Inflection point

An inflection point is a moment after which things will change, no doubt in a transformative way. So says Investopedia: “An event that results in a significant change in the progress of a company, industry, sector, economy or geopolitical situation.”

Issues

To call something a “problem” is utterly verboten in the office: it’s bound to a) scare the horses and b), even worse, focus responsibility on the bosses. So let us instead deploy the compassionate counselling-speak of “issues”. The critic (and manager) Robert Potts translates “There are some issues around X” as: “There is a problem so big that we are scared to even talk about it directly.”

ITL

Much of the senior executive’s work is spent dreaming up new euphemisms for the sadly necessary business of firing people. After “downsizing” was considered too much of a downer, we got “rightsizing”, then “demising”, as though sacking people was actually killing them. But the best new circumlocution for getting rid of people is the innocuous-seeming initialism ITL, which stands for: “Invited to leave.” There is, of course, no possibility of declining such an invitation, although if there is severance involved at least there’ll be an “ITL package”, and so forth. You have to love the chutzpah of “invited”, as though one were being offered the chance to go to a really good party, which, let’s face it, definitely isn’t happening in the office.

Journey

A peculiarly horrible modern bureaucratic habit of turning everything into a journey, with its ersatz thrill of adventurous tourism and its therapeutic implications of personal growth. So businesses infantilise their employees by saying they have all been on a fascinating voyage together, when in fact many of their colleagues have been brutally thrown from the bus.

Kaizen

You can accomplish transformative change through gradual improvements, or so says mystical wisdom from the east. If saying: “Let’s try consistently to make things better,” doesn’t sound sufficiently impressive, just drop the word “kaizen” instead.

Key

With your key core competencies, you can no doubt achieve the key performance indicators, take on key challenges, and overcome key issues to meet key milestones and placate our key stakeholders, going forward. But why the hell is everything key?

Leverage

The critic Robert Potts reports this parodic-sounding but deathly real example: “We need to leverage our synergies.” Other things you can leverage, according to recent straightfaced news and business reports, are expertise, cloud infrastructure, “the federal data”, training and “Hong Kong’s advantages”. To leverage, in such examples, usually means nothing more than “to use” or “exploit”. Thus, “leverage support” means “ask Bob in IT”; and I suggest “leverage the drinkables infrastructure” as a stylish new way to say “make the coffee”.

Matrix

The matrix is everywhere you look in the modern office. You can have an accountability matrix (AKA a responsibility assignment matrix), a functional matrix, a project matrix and so on ad nauseam. Of course, there is even a sub-species of management called – you guessed it – matrix management.

Moat

We have Game of Thrones to thank for the fact that business jargon. It is “used to describe products or services that protect a company from incursions by competitors”. It seems that if you’re not busy building a moat, you’re digging your own grave.

No-brainer

An “obviously a good idea”, however, is both inverted boast and threat. “This is a no-brainer!” means not only “I did not engage my brain for a second in coming up with this idea”, but also “You should not engage your brain in any attempt to argue with it”. It is thus an announcement and a recommendation for perfect zombie-like stupidity.

Offline, take this.

“Hey, can we take this offline?” This is a truly bizarre modern way to say: “Let’s talk about it later or in private.

Paradigm shift

“The firm’s purpose is to make money for its shareholders, to a customer-centric view of the world in which the purpose of the firm is to add value for customers.”

Pivot

Pivoting is an euphemism for failing. It’s what you do when your business model proves to be a crock: just pivot to another one, and maybe another one after that, until something sticks.

Quality

The hopeful invocation of quality is magical speech that hopes to conjure into being something that is indefinable but definitely better than flat-out rubbishness. But the insertion of quality into a business slogan or mission statement is also sometimes camouflage for less sunny intentions.: “Delivering Quality First” perhaps means delivering quality first and garbage later?

Revert

“Let me revert …” is a common way now of promising to do something. Reply? Respond? Whatever was wrong with those? While revert is less infuriatingly circuitous than “circle back”, there is still something sonically rather unlovely about it.

Runway

How long is your runway? This is a normal business question, particularly in the tech industry, where as Bloomberg reports, execs used it “2,348 times in analyst calls, presentations and filings over the last decade”. In this sense, your “runway” is simply how long your company can last before running out of money.

Segment (verb)

“We’ve got to segment that down.” Like many apparently modern abuses of language, the transitive use of segment as a verb – “to divide into segments”. An excellent question to start any meeting: “How do we segment the stream of speech into category-designating units?”

Snackable

I regret to observe that “snackable content” is a thing in marketing, meaning an attempt to draw people in with bite-sized nuggets of text or video or whatever so as to bolster brand visibility.

Sweep the sheds

Oddly, “sweeping the sheds” has become a popular buzzphrase for a kind of humble attention to detail. Do you know anyone who actually sweeps their shed? Isn’t the whole point of a shed that you don’t have to sweep it?

Swim lanes

Business jargon likes to make itself sound fun by borrowing terms from more exciting pursuits. The mundane truth is that a swim lane is a column or row in a flowchart, with each lane devoted to one unit or process within the business, but that doesn’t quite evoke the cheering crowd and overpowering stench of chlorine.

Sunset

This is an imagistic verbing – “We’re going to sunset that project/service/version” – that sounds more humane and poetic than “cancel” or “kill” or “stop supporting”.

Thought shower

The term “brainstorm” is now discouraged, since some people think it’s insensitive to people with epilepsy, on the dubious basis that an epileptic attack is like a storm in the brain. In fact, the National Society for Epilepsy surveyed its members in 2005 as to whether they found the term “brainstorming” offensive, and a large majority said no. Nevertheless, it is more common these days to be invited to a thought shower, which no doubt sounds like a naked romp.

Transformative

These days, of course, a change is all the better if it is transformative. A change that was not transformative, however, would just be fiddling about, because a transformation is a change in form or a thorough metamorphosis.

Upskill

Have you been upskilled lately? It’s an odd idea. To say that you will upskill a person seems to figure the subject as a kind of upgradeable cyborg assistant, into which new programs may, at any time, be uploaded so as to improve its contribution to profit. We are thus invited to imagine a glorious ascent of a virtual ladder of “competencies”, the better to forget that upskilling usually means demanding more work for the same pay.

Vertical

Oh, right, the verticals. Yep, we need to “leverage” the “learnings” across all the verticals. I’m totally on board with that. Oh, we need to talk about “content strategy in a difficult vertical”? Sure, good idea! [Sotto voce] What the hell are verticals again? According to Forbes, a vertical is: “A specific area of expertise.

Yield

Don’t ever say that your plan will “give” or “cause” or “result in” great things; the only verb to use here is yield.

Extracted from Who Touched Base In My Thought Shower?: A Treasury of Unbearable Office Jargon by Steven Poole, published by Sceptre