- Bravo Giles Coren for writing in The Times about all the ‘meaningless jargon’ that modern managers employ in their everyday business chitchat/ office-speak/ Powerpoint presentations
- No doubt such words meet their need to sound important – but are ‘utterly superfluous’
- They disguise the fact that they often don’t really understand what they’re talking about
- And, more importantly, neither do their audiences
- Managers are the main drivers of productivity improvement – they alone have the power and responsibility to decide and then organise changes needed
- But it’s their teams that have to implement them – so they need clear direction and motivation for the action needed, not ‘corporate codswallop’
- Managers so inclined should thus bear in mind the wise words of Albert Einstein: “If they can’t explain it to a 6-year old, it’s (probably) because they don’t understand it themselves” – for that is what many on the receiving end may think
- We listed the following tired cliche examples of ‘What NOT to say’ in our book ‘Productivity Knowhow Revisited’ viz:
- At the end of the day
- Ballpark figure
- Between a rock and a hard place
- Blue sky thinking
- Get in front of the curve
- Get on the same page
- Glass half-full
- Lack the bandwidth
- Mission critical
- Move the goalposts
- Park that offline
- Push the envelope
- Sing from the same hymn sheet (if you don’t want to be heard?)
- Step up to the plate
- Think outside the box
- Walk the walk, talk the talk
- But Giles Coren goes further – so enjoy his list below and reflect on when you last had to listen to such tripe, from whom:
- Dig into granular detail
- Get you up to speed
- Hit the ground running
- Start on a level playing field
- Reinvent the wheel
- Run a few ideas up the flagpole – sliding up and down my flagpole
- Tackling the low-hanging fruit
- Paradigm shifts
- Sea change, step change, lane change, gear change, tidal change
- Blue sky thinking
- Green sky optionality, brown sky pontification
- Curve balls
- Thinking outside the box
- Stepping up to the plate
- Circling the box for a reach-around
- Loop into a holistic approach from the get-go
- Ping you for an update
- Fast forward
- Synergise
- Jump on a call, hop on a Zoom, leap on a LinkedIn, straddle a Slack thread
- Bang the sweet bejesus out of a Teams meeting
- I just wanted to touch base
- Put a pin in that one
- Get all your ducks in a row
- Plenty of boots on the ground
- Action the optics so as to optimise the visuals
- Pencil it in until such time as you can put it on hold
CONCLUSION – Bravo Giles Coren – please keep banging that drum – louder if possible