I get annoyed by thoughtless and uncreative use of certain overused terms/statements in corporate settings. Below are some that are so annoying, they distract me from the conversation. What are some that annoy you?
- Peel back the layers of an onion
- Incentivize
- Let’s table that so we can circle back to it later
- We’ll out that on the backburner
- Let’s not reinvent the wheel
- They just started a new project, so their plate’s full and might not have the bandwidth for an additional something else.
- Grab the low-hanging fruit
- That’s a game changer
- The ball’s in their court. If you don’t hear from them soon, send them an email to touch base.
- I sent it up the food chain, so it’s out of my hands.
- Let’s give it 110%
- There are lots of moving parts
- We need to have an aha moment
- At the end of the day, what matters are the key takeaways
- Let’s engage in the best practices
- They’re working on it as we speak
- It’s a controversial approach, so we might get some flak for that.
- So-and-so is not a people person
🤢
I loathe each and every one of those, except “swim-lanes” which I can accept only because I hear it used when talking about actual flowchart swim-lanes (which is still a better term than “rows that represent different roles or actors within a given work process”).