Let’s have a lunch and learn!
Alright, team, let’s circle back and ensure we’re fully aligned on our north star objectives. We need to leverage synergy, engage in blue-sky thinking, and touch base on our pain points to drive mission-critical outcomes. But let’s not boil the ocean with unnecessary jargon - at the end of the day, we need to optimize our bandwidth for real, value-driven impact. If we keep moving the needle with this kind of thought leadership theater, we risk losing sight of our core competencies and drowning in a sea of meaningless buzzwords. Let’s pivot toward clear, actionable insights and sunset the overuse of strategic messaging before it becomes a blocker to true innovation. Instead of just playing the fast-follow game with every trending framework, let’s focus on original, high-impact execution that actually drives results.
Thoughts?Chris, do you have any builds?No?
Good. Then let’s action this and drive it across the finish line!
Jesus fucking Christ. This was excellently written and horribly real.
Other than the lack of a “shift left” it’s just about perfect.
What’s shift left
Basically just means handling problems earlier rather than later, catching issues early instead of fixing them when they cause expensive issues.
It usually means moving tasks earlier in a workflow. You could often also just say “start early”.
There’s also “shift right”. 😄
shift right
Me commenting insteada sleeping when I have to get up in 5 hours right?
Perfect example!
Buzzwords
I threw up in my mouth a little bit.
Thanks. It hit close to home. I hate it.
Lol
I heard “rightsizing” for the first time last year.
I have no idea what knucklehead PR dumbass came up with that but it made the following layoffs even more unpalatable.
The only time I hear rightsizing is for cloud resources. I’ve never heard of it in human resources. That sucks.
“Tribal knowledge.”
- image: We, clan. Together, strong.
- reality: Ask Tommy if he remembers how to reset the printer
Though, I actually like this one. It’s a pretty cool phrase you can use anywhere.
I call this one oral tradition, it always gets a chuckle
This is normally called “institutional knowledge” which is definitely a real thing, I don’t think it’s a marketing or HR buzzword. Though, a lot of the time it somewhat trivial things those things do add up. Institutional knowledge around things like how to deal with a finicky piece of specialized hardware, or what are the right words to convince your bosses boss to pay for you to go to a conference are pretty helpful. If you have an older “individual contributor” in your company that has been there for a while and hasn’t climbed the ladder, they might be a gold mine for that kinda info (they could also just be an ass)
wow I was not expecting to find something worthwhile in here but I will definitely be using that lol
Bio break.
I don’t think I have to elaborate on that one.
This is a gamer term. I’ve never heard it in a business environment. Even as a IT engineer.
Lucky you, it’s all over my company.
I like it because it’s so vague.
A nap is pretty biological! And nobody will ask why your bio break was an hour long.
Thats not so much a corpo thing as a gamer thing IMO.
“AFK, Bio break” is much quicker to type.
I never heard a gamer use “bio break” lol
Uh. It’s been used for YEEEEEEEEEEEEEEAAAAAAAARS in MMOs.
^ usually just “brb bio” or “afk bio”, or just “bio”.
Its seriously old, like, “woot” or “LFG” levels of old.
Makes sense! I haven’t played a real-time MMO since RuneScape was new! Haha
Maybe it’s an American thing, because give never heard it used on European servers
Quicker than “brb, bathroom”?
I like “piss” and my char just stops moving
Yeah, hate this. To everyone saying it’s not corporate: or certainly is. I did B2B work for around a hundred corps through the one I worked at and I heard it at probably 70% of them.
It’s just the company trying to control literally every part of your life. Like who gives a shit what I do on my break? That, and you can’t get an “extra” break later saying you have to pee.
I work at a school and that one gets used sometimes. A lady that helps us develop programming said it quite often and my colleagues picked it up, I don’t use it myself.
fuck. i hate this one the most.
just say “break.” let everyone else decide for themselves if it needs to be biological in nature.
I don’t use that, I usually just say I’m going to go grab some water but it’s better than saying “brb ima go take a wicked piss”. That being said, I’d respect the hell out of anyone who said that
I always used “gotta go drain the lizard.”
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- Alignment
- Scalable
- Circle back
If you use these regularly I KNOW the meeting you just booked me into should have been an email.
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I can’t remember last time I heard someone use it in a normal conversation, but in the corporate world I find it gets incredibly overused.
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It’s fine is used properly, but management tends to use it to mean “magically gooder.”
I always hated “circle back” but I did get into using it ironically for a while.
“let’s just put a pin in that, and circle back to it later”
I wouldn’t actually mind “circle back” if it wasn’t just used as cover to kick the can down the road.
For me the guy who always said it was a former boss and he was good at actually circling back, but sometimes it felt more like “fuck that for now.”
Every meeting should be a fucking email.
I spend more time in meetings talking about the work I’m going to do, than doing the actual fucking work.
Bro I have my first “big company” job after working smaller places for over a decade. This feels so real. I’m dying.
I’m not in many meetings but when I am, I oversell and overpromise then immediately forget everything we discussed as soon as it ends.
Just send a fucking email.
I always want to do things by email instead of a meeting, but have to admit the meeting is often necessary. Of course it wouldn’t be if people could actually read and comprehend a detailed email and if they could also actually communicate information into writing without expecting you to be their minds enough to make sense of the incomplete vague phases they hurriedly type.
Unless there is a need for faster communication or because it covers a topic that people have strong emotions about and need to see how others respond so they don’t assume the other person’s feelings about something. There are some cases where humans, being social animals, do need some interaction beyond words to accomplish coordinated tasks.
The vast majority of meetings should be emails though. Just wish people actually read emails…
Touch base too
FUCK touching base that one’s the worst.
Can we put a pin in that and circle back later? Maybe parking lot it and we can discuss it at the end of the call
Referring to people, staff as resources. Nice and dehumanizing.
An old line manager referred to me as a resource in front of me once. I should have told her to fuck off.
I’ve heard “human capital” before. The soulless fucks make others a commodity by stripping the mere mention of their existance of its humanity.
I had one retail manager who constantly kept using “moving forward” for everything. It was so freaking grating!
I hate that I’ve learned to censor myself around these soulless void-skulls by replacing “problem” with “challenge.” No, I don’t “solve problems”, because to acknowledge something as a problem is negativity we just don’t need here at Emperor Clothing Inc! I “tackle challenges”!
It’s so freaking goofy and they just eat it up. Everything needs some sort of business-positive spin or they lose their minds and think you’re not being a “team player.”
Seeing opportunities everywhere. The same underlying mechanism is at work here as with challenge: Let’s replace the word for this bad thing with a different word that means something similar but positive. And then it looks like something good! I am very smart
I’ve got a manager that’s replaced problem with “opportunity to succeed”. Well, I’ve got 99 opportunities to succeed I guess.
Well, I’ve got 99 opportunities to succeed…
…but management ain’t one!
Anything they use to replace the word “layoffs”.
Rightsizing
Fun sizing
Snack Sizing
How dare you not overachieve for your corporate overlords!
Dance, monkey, dance!
That they treat you like “family”
They do, the family just happens to be dysfunctional and abusive.
“Department / Corporate Retreat”
As in, “we’re holding our annual corporate retreat next Wednesday! It’ll be offsite, you’re all required to be there, and we’ll be spending the day having a 6 hour meeting about absolutely nothing, just like we do every year. But dont worry, when we’re done we’ll play a game no one wants to play, or do a craft no one wants to do, but everyone will pretend they enjoy it because if they don’t, they’re not ‘team players.’”
This year, our day-long-nothing-meeting was about how management is working to secure everyone’s jobs despite budget cuts, and we have nothing to worry about. Then we took a personality quiz that said I was a character from Stranger Things. Then the next day, they told me I’m getting laid off and have 3 months left at the company.
Fucking RETREATS are so relaxing.
That’s what you get for being such a Will
Actually, I’m a Nancy!
A negative Nancy for sure /s
Briefcase wanker.
“No”
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Sounds like a meeting.
There are many but I find “let’s double-click on that” particularly grating
I always reply with, “Or we could right-click on that to see our options”.
“I already three-finger-swiped down to minimize, sorry.”
“We work hard and play hard” makes my skin crawl. Also, had a manager who would describe every situation with a war analogy. Sorry Bob, this is Finance, we’re not literally killing each other. Take it down a notch.
Everybody dance now!
MVP - as in “minimum viable product”
More commonly known as the slop of a product or solution that’s being slinged to all the markets early on without adequate documentation, support, usability, scalability, standards or security.
“Corner the market” also deserves a disgusting mention.
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“Oh yeah? What’s my name then?”
