Like certain fellow dopers and about 10,000 people worldwide, I will be writing an entire novel during the month of November. My plot, described here, involves three corporate executives on a quest in a fantasy kingdom, complete with dwarves, dragons, swordfighting, and so forth. Now, to fill in the middle chapters, I need some scenes in which corporate thinking and culture clashes with the high fantasy environment. To that end, I’m making a list of common words and phrases, positions, and things associated with the corporate environment. So far I’ve got:
“Think outside the box.”
Board meetings and other meetings
Diversity training seminars
“Be proactive.”
“Client-centered…”
“Think win-win.”
“There’s no ‘I’ in team.”
Cubicles
Middle management
Sexual harrassment lawsuits
Now I turn to you, the esteemed citizens of the Straight Dope Message Board, for more corporate cliches that I can reference.
You don’t contact or talk to someone, you “connect” with them. I was going to also say “reach out to” but Twickster beat me to it.
When you ask what someone’s workload is for the day, say, “what’s your bandwidth like for today?”
I am not making that last one up. I have about a million from that company but I don’t want to expose myself because they’ve actually trademarked some of their phrases.
I was in a departmental meeting a couple of days ago when the person in our department who can most reliably be counted on to provide businessisms offered, “And the value that I added to that project was (blah blah blah).” It was, unexpectedly, a heretofore unencountered version of that old chestnut, “value-added.”
Also, she doesn’t need to “do” something; rather, she has “an action that I need to move forward with.” I fought the urge in the meeting to correct her usage to “an action with which I need to move forward.”