All posts need to have the same title: me_irl it is allowed to use an emoji instead of the underscore _
"Actionable insights" is the opposite of these corpo buzzwords.
It's a phrase I use to shut down clients when they ask for something that doesn't have value. Also know as interesting but not actionable. I prioritize my time on finding actionable insights. Data that can drive decisions.
Ok but hear me out.
We acquired 20 new logos this month!
"Net new logos" was an actual term used in the company I previously worked for.
Check out Wierd Al's Mission Statement for a primer
George Carlin also has a bit of just corporate jargon stapled together to make a short little speech.
I'm fucking mad that I hear many of these every day and ENGLISH IS NOT MY FUCKING MOTHERTONGUE YOU FUCKING FUCKS
Ping me
Same, but to be honest.. attempts to migrate some words to your own language can also get very awkward.
My least favourite was my company motto of "Personal, Simple, Brilliant." It was supposed to be an ethos that ran through the whole company. It was actually just what management expected front line workers to be towards customers, regardless of whether the business leaders were making decisions to screw over the customer and the front line staff or not.
The amount of times I asked for support only to be shot down and laughed at when I told them "Well, that doesn't sound very personal, simple or brilliant to me." when speaking of their management culture.
Customer success management
For some unknown reason the phrase "thought leader" drives me crazy.
How do you feel about “Leading thought leader”? 🤮
Agile and synergize aligned itself into this chat.
look at this guy being proactive
It's a totally outrageous paradigm.
It's interoperable, baby. It's how we get to "done" by energising ourselves, being more agile, adapting to new models, and advocating on behalf of--
Okay, I can't do anymore I'm repulsed.
I hate you for writing that. I hate that those words are present in my daily work life. Fuck corporate language.
Let’s table that for a second and circle back to it. Help me understand why you hate me for writing that. What can I do to help? Consider that our goal is to maximise our efficiency by staying in our lanes, escalating where required, and providing all necessary language to our partners for transparency’s sake.
LOL I’m really sorry to do that to you bud but it’s fun to laugh at the way we have to talk in corporate world
No worries, it's all in good fun :)
I cannot tell you how many bosses Ive had/ heard say they are going to have a moment of "radical kindness" and then proceed to just RIP into their employees until they cry.
Corporate double speak is wack.
what are “new verticals”? do i even want to know?
Verticals are industries. I.e, "services" or "wholesale" are verticals.
They are opportunities for increasing shareholder value through innovative and disruptive market-leading practices.
🤢🤮
I mean not necessarily, they could just be ways to expand profit centers by increasing pipeline opportunities through net new MQLs
Where's unlock?
I'm in full swing of a job search and I painfully relate to this image
No way, this is a great reference chart. All the actionables have been curated into one place.
I don't understand why business people do this to themselves. I quit working for large organizations in favor of smaller companies that pay less, because at least there's much less of this. It does get unbearable.
Lingo is a powerful social tool. Once you know to look for it, you see it everywhere.
Some lingo is always necessary for jobs to communicate complex ideas quickly. Everyone has terms and phrases used in their profession that are exclusive to it, as well as some that are exclusive to their workplace. People outside of their job don't know the lingo, those inside do. In this way lingo is a double-edged sword: it eases communication, but creates a social barrier between those in the know and everyone else.
In an increasing number of places this isolating side effect has been used by certain groups as the motivation for them to contrive lingo. For a long time this was largely relegated to cults and other fringe groups that wanted to shore up the feeling of togetherness of the people within and keep them away from outsiders.
The big change was when groups found that by constantly changing the lingo they could induce two other effects: the exclusion of outsiders and exerting control over existing insiders. The MBA/business types are a prime example of this. For people in or seeking to be a part of the group knowing the latest buzzwords is a must, and not knowing them or using outdated ones opens them up to being ostracized. People who are "in" must constantly stay up to date, thus staying attentive to the trends of the group. At the same time people with a casual interest or interaction are actively dissuaded by how often unfamiliar words are used by members of the group.
This sort of weaponized use of lingo is much more widespread these days. Once you see it in this case you can find it in just about every flavor of modern political group and online forum. If you find a group that seems to always be changing its buzzwords, buyer beware.
The only thing I would disagree on is that lingo is a recent phenomenon. That's just recency bias.
The Catholic Church used Latin at mass from its inception to the mid-20th century, and the oldest Greek versions of the Bible already use some words we simply have never seen anywhere else.
Philosophers have always been a notorious PITA with using existing words or close derivatives of existing words with different meanings, sometimes the lingo is specific to a single author.
And let's not even get into judicial lingo and its very ancient and storied use of disenfranchising the less fortunate who did not speak it and could not afford a lawyer to speak it for them - that is when the court system wasn't in Latin.
Corporate lingo takes more room in our lives as large corporations take up more and more of the economic and political landscape (with some interesting evolutions in form thanks to the influence of Globish). That's it.
The only thing I would disagree on is that lingo is a recent phenomenon. That’s just recency bias.
Ever-changing lingo is almost certainly a recent phenomenon, as the pace and frequency of communication has changed drastically recently.
It's difficult to get a new buzzword to float to a massive audience without mass communication. More recently, the president can invent a new buzzword (e.g. one I remember viscerally is "WMD"s which I swear I had never heard before the run-up to the Iraq war) and have social media, mass media, and individual people saying it in under a week.
I also think this is partly why "Gen Z speak" sounds so strange to my ear. When I heard "rizz" I knew without looking it up that it was invented and dispersed in online circles. Sure, there have been other generations with their own lingo, but other generations didn't cook up country-wide or even worldwide lingo that can be directly attributed to one YouTube personality or another. Growing up I very, very rarely heard people using online subculture speak (e.g. l33t sp34k) in real life because we all knew it would sound fucking stupid.
You're just getting old. Things have perhaps gotten a little faster in general, but Gen Z didn't invent slang. Also "skibbidy rizz" is Gen Alpha more than Z. And slang very rarely is attributable to a single personality. Apparently Kai Cenat popularized "rizz", but it had existed for a long time before and has way outgrown him. The vast majority of people who unironically say "rizz" don't even know who he is.
The linguistic phenomenon isn't even linked to the internet particularly. It's just a contraction of "charisma", hardly an unusual way for slang to emerge pre-internet and not comparable to 1337 5p34k which never made it out of terminally online subcultures.
Before the internet, radio, TV, and the press were effective tools for massively spreading slang. Boomers had no issues making "cool" cool, as well as a bunch of other slang words that unlike "cool" aren't cool anymore.
Your generation had "WMDs" but I'm sure boomers had similar things with Vietnam, and their parents with WWII. Hell, in 1918 or so the entire world learned the phrase "Spanish flu" like we did "COVID". The more things change the more they stay the same.
And how can we forget "OK" whose origins are mysterious but generally people agree it comes from a short lived 19th century linguistic fad that gave "Oll Korrect" (what's for sure is that "okay" came after "OK"). Now "OK" is quite possibly the most universal word in existence. Sure back then it probably took a few years to spread within the anglosphere, but OTOH there was also much more dialectic variability in language across regions so it's not like there was less going on, it was just more fragmented.
People have always been going crazy with language and each generation appropriates their mother tongue in their unique way. The idea that language is even remotely static or "used to be less crazy" is entirely false, yet every generation perpetuates this idea when confronted with new slang they don't understand.
Grit. I worked at a massive tech company that found this one and it was fucking everywhere. I don't mind the basic concept of it, but it was just in every conversation for like 2+ years.
Alternative title how you know you need to find another place to work
This shit makes me want to start a cult in the woods so I can live completely isolated from corporate culture bullshit
I once got an email from an executive C-level who mentioned adding value at least four times in a single paragraph.
Annoying as hell because the email hardly contained anything of substance.
Description, GIF of a giant pile of tires on fire in a field with lots of black smoke.
