At the end of the day, value-added synergy can be achieved if we interface and think outside the box.
That nausea-inducing sentence contains five instances of “corporate speak,” those annoying, ever-present words and phrases that movers and shakers incorporate into their everyday business vocabulary, to the point where they quickly become clichés.
The national staffing service firm Accountemps recently surveyed 150 senior executives from America’s 1,000 largest companies to determine which buzzwords were the most annoying. Among their responses: “on the same page,” “leverage,” “disconnect,” “reach out,” “game changer,” “circle back” and “it is what it is.”
“When business or industry terms become overused, people stop paying attention to them,” says Max Messmer, Accountemps chairman.
Except, perhaps, to make fun of them.
“‘Paradigm shift’ is a funny one, but my favorite is ‘burgeoning technology,’ because isn’t all technology burgeoning?” says Jerry Church, director of media and public relations for the Association of Central Oklahoma Governments. “That is one I always crack up at. The one that I hear all the time now is ‘the elephant in the room.’ It’s intriguing because … it’s very visual, but it’s kind of obnoxious, because it make you think, ‘Is it really that big of a problem?’”
Phil Bacharach, press secretary and chief writer for Gov. Brad Henry, also finds himself “particularly amused by ‘paradigm shift,’ because I don’t know what it means, and I suspect that a lot of people who use it just use it to fill in space.”
“I think I find them more amusing than cringe-worthy. I think some of them are kind of funny,” Bacharach says. “‘Facilitate’ is one I’m probably guilty of using quite a bit, but that’s also something that seems kind of made up to bolster résumés.”
For Christine Dillon, director of communications and marketing at Oklahoma City University, “crafting” is the term that currently sticks in her craw.
“Like ‘crafting a message,’” she says. “I always want to say, ‘Are we going need a glue stick for this? Some Popsicle sticks?’
“‘We’re going to craft our response.’ Really? How about we just write our response?” Dillon says. “One from a few years back was ‘dovetailing.’ I hated it, but everything had to dovetail.”
BUZZWORDS
Roy Georgia, chief customer officer of business-intelligence provider Genascis, says buzzwords are just an inescapable element of the workplace.
“It makes you sound credible, using the latest lingo,” he says. “It’s part of doing business.”
Bacharach says he’s guilty of using corporate speak at times, but “too often, there’s just not a better way of saying the same thing – specifically, ‘state-of-the-art’ and ‘cutting-edge technology.’”
“I think writing for the written word and writing for speech are such different animals, in that clichés and so-called trite phrases are a lot more permissible in speeches because the way you receive information by ear is a lot different than taking in something on the page,” he says. “You try to avoid them wherever you’re writing, but there’s more of a place for them in something that’s delivered orally, as opposed to on a page, which really leaps out at you.”
While also admitting to relying on them at times, Church thinks corporate America latches on to such phrases out of laziness.
“It’s just convenient. We live in a fast society and have short memories,” he says. “They pick up on a couple of buzzwords and ride that one out until somebody invents something new.”
Dillon believes the platitudes are part of the business world and a way for people to feel like they’re in the know, “but they’re also instantly overused.”
“I think there are trends in language just like there are trends in fashion or technology. I think it’s a combination of a popular cultural trend and wanting to feel like you fit in,” she says. “There’s a certain amount of tribalism in our society, and to align yourself with a certain group of people, you speak the language, you carry the phone, you read the Oklahoma Gazette, you participate in common activities in order to feel like you’re part of the group.”
Hey, it is what it is.