I can no longer smugly ridicule the office buzz-heads who spout out one canned corporate catchphrase (let’s take this offline!) after another (keep me in the loop!) after another (to your point!)….
With great shame, I must confess my own infraction.
The other day, I was on a conference call with a particularly painful colleague who kept going on with one dumb idea after another, when suddenly I heard myself pipe up like the little officebot I never thought I was: “If I could be so bold as to make a suggestion, I think we should kill the whole proposal…”
Yes, I really said that. I could actually hear it echoing in my head for hours after the call. If I could be so bold?! If I could be so lame? If I could shoot myself?!
Am I now an official practitioner of corporate-speak, that tangled language of suit-wearing squares everywhere?
Let’s just say that best case scenario, no one flags my recent stumble, and I can keep it under the radar, corporate-speak is a slippery slope, and I’m sure to circle back to MBA catch phrases sooner rather than later….
I mean, why tell my client I will call her when it sounds oh so sophisticated to say I will reach out to her? Why agree with accounting when I can get on the same page with them? Proofreading is so passé; anyone in the know knows that now it’s all about getting a second pair of eyes on your document. And who needs to tell people anything, now that you can shoot them an FYI, give them a heads up, reference what’s coming down the pipeline, or just run your idea up the flagpole?
Yes, my lovely readers, love it or hate it, it seems we are married to a common business shorthand (or longhand as the case may be). Wanna sound like you are ahead of the curve? You gotta talk about the elephant in the room, and refer to best practices and maximizing efficiencies as much as possible. Need to break free from analysis paralysis? Simply put pen to paper. Buying time for a late presentation? Tell the point person that you are still distilling everyone’s input into buckets, and then you have to scrub the deck and wordsmith.
