“Paradigm” - I LOOOVE that commercial (is it Sprint? Can you hear me now?) in which that clown pronounces it “pair-a-dig-um”. It kills me every time.
JESSE!..Step outside the box.
THere’s my pet peeve. "Empower’, my ass.
“We want to empower our associates to be proactive and make decisions!” And we will will mightily smote them if they make a bad decision, or steal the credit if they make a right decision.
OK, a few comments:
Deliverables - doesn’t just refer to a presentation or a report; it’s anything that is required by a contract or agreement with the client - so it’s easier to say that we have “four deliverables as agreed” than to say “we have one report, a presentation, a spreadsheet, and a series of recommendation due in a month.” Of course, in saying this, your boss is assuming that a) you can read and b) you know your job. If that’s a mistaken assumption, oh well.
Lessons Learned - it’s a concise way of asking what was learned in an iteration of a process or a project. It’s much more friendly than “OK, who fucked up and how bad?”
Value-added - rather ironic in that if you’re posting to this thread from work, you’re probably not adding value to the client.
On the bench/beach - depending on the company, you have plenty of say over how you are staffed; in PW, C&L, and PwC you actually had to get out and meet people and steer your own career - if you happened to be unwilling to do that, don’t whine about going nowhere.
Six Sigma - while I still have some questions about the methods as they relate to reducing cost, the customer-focus is a good approach to business. Given that, in my experience, most people think in this order 1) my own ass 2) my team 3) my company 4) the customer - I’ve got no problems with actually focusing on the people who pay the bills.
Anyway, a lot of the others were good, but the ones that weren’t make revel in the knowledge that I have many years of consulting ahead in which to lay all of you off for not being team players. 
Why, they even “make me revel” in that knowledge too.
I agree with most of what people are saying… but I take exception to one thing many of you have complained about, namely, “let’s discuss this offline”. This is not some BS word like “paradigm” or “empower” that is basically thrown in to make stupid people seem important. It’s just a term that has a specific, and often useful, meaning, namely, “let’s discuss this in some context other than the current meeting”. In fact, the vast majority of stupid business meetings would benefit if more things were taken offline.
So if it offends you, at least it does so for different reasons…
Max wrote:
Um, how about the term, “elsewhere”? As in, “Let’s discuss this elsewhere.”
I also nominate:
Benchmark
Other pet hates:
“Wall-clock time” - as opposed to “grandfather-clock time”?
“Round-table discussion” - as opposed to what? An “octagonal-table discussion”?
I suppose they mean “around-the-table discussion,” but what the fuck does this extraneous information about the setting of the discussion contribute?
Wherever could this lead? “Sitting-on-the crapper-talking-to-the-guy-in-the-next-cubicle discussion?” WE DON’T WANT TO KNOW, ASSHOLE!
“You may be right!” and “I never thought of that!”
Translation: "I think you’re full of shit, but I have to kiss your ass, so I will say something that kind of sounds like I’m agreeing with you, but, upon closer examination, is really a totally meaningless phrase.
Thanks, Dale Carnegie, signed Another Satisfied Customer."
“Think positive!”
Extra annoying when the thing about which you are supposed to “think positive” is already a done deal, and whatever you think will have no effect whatsoever on the outcome: “I think I failed the test.” “THINK POSITIVE!”
Besides, it’s grammatically incorrect. If you must say it, at least say it correctly: 'Think positively." (But, really, I’d prefer you didn’t say it at all.)
Task is not a verb.
But my all-time favorite is the proud announcement: We are at the top of the second-tier of (type of organization)
In other words, we’re such a small organization no one knows who we are or what we do.
“Get someone’s input” - I hate when people who have no clue about computer try to use computer metaphors. Like me using a sporting metaphor 
Actually I can’t think of a simple alternative to this one. “Obtain someone’s opinion”? “Get someone’s thoughts” ? “Ask someone what he thinks” ?
Feel free to allow these to upset you, but please take the time to understand where they originated.
“Wall-clock” time (which may, indeed, have moved out of computers to become some distorted metaphor, although I have not encountered it), had a very specific technical meaning. When looking at computer run times, the statisitcs generated and reported were tagged to the amount of CPU processing and ignored wait states. In test, a job could run for 12 minutes, but when it was moved to production, running in competition with hundreds of other applications, its run time might extend out to 30 or 50 or more minutes. Looking at the statistics for CPU usage would give the neophyte programmer a misleading impression of how his job had an impact on production (or how soon he could expect to be able to show the results to the user). “Wall-clock time” measured the actual run duration and was needed for one set of measurements, CPU time measured the amount of computer resources that the job sucked up and was needed for a different measurement.
A Round Table discussion hearkens back to King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table in which there was no primacy of postion. Since there was no “head” of the table, there was no fighting over who was more honored. A round-table discussion is one in which vice-presidents, operational managers, bean counters, and shirtsleeve techs can all meet to discuss an issue and each idea will be judged on its merits, rather than by who proposed the idea. (Not that anyone in such meetings actually fails to know where they stand in the pecking order, but the ostensible intent is to allow freedom of discussion without regard to rank.)
I heard my father say this one at Thanksgiving dinner and I went totally ballistic, telling him how uneducated and idiotic it sounded. Really out of character for me, and it didn’t go over well either. Heh.
I hate the phrase “grow your business.” It’s not a plant.
Downsize
Outplace
Just tell people they are getting laid off. Cut the crap.
Diversity ( nice word for learn to do everyone’s job cause you gonna need to one day)
Put down another benchmark
bargining/non-bargining employees
essential/non-essential employees
internal/external customer
Why is this a problem? If I sell to one entity who pays me by check or EFT and another entity who pays by a General Ledger adjustment, they are both customers (and I have worked at companies where the guy using general ledger was free to go elsewhere to select the product, so the transaction really required a sale), but I have different legal obligations regarding how I represent that sale to the IRS. (Maybe you just hate your internal customers but there is a need to identify and distinguish between them.)
I can’t believe I am the first to submit this one:
INTERFACE
I hear it most often in its verb form: Engineers and testers should interface with one another.
Why not just say, “Engineers and testers should work with each other”?
“Challenge” sounds like it might be hard. I prefer “opportunity”. Like when the company is hemorrhaging money because of all the lawsuits. That’s an “opportunity”.
Tell your managing partner that you would rather not work on a particular engagement and see what happens. My experience is that you go where they tell you and do it with a smile. Your ability to “go somewhere” depends on what the partnership can sell and whether or not you happen to be available for staffing when they sell it. If there isn’t any work, get ready to hear the following conversation over and over again:
Staff Consultant: “Hey Bob! I’m interested in working on a project in XYX but I can’t seem to get staffed”
Manager: “That’s great! Way to be proactive! You’re doing exactly what you need to do to get staffed on an XYZ.”
SC: “umm…don’t you typically work on XYZ engagements?”
M: “yeahh…well we haven’t sold any lately…but we have some stuff in the pipeline!”
um…yeah…good luck with that:
-A.T. Kearny’s 2001 MBA class of Associates are STILL waiting for their start dates (going on 19 months)
-McKinsey invited most of their 2002 (I think) class to leave the firm
-Deloitte Consulting (a.k.a Braxton) gave most of their staff a salary adjustment of around negative 9-15%.
-Sarbanes-Oxley has pretty much ensured that the Big Four can no longer leverage their Audit clients for consulting work.
-Arthur Andersen - 'nough said
-Accenture is still laying people off like crazy
-Do the Sapients, Scients, Viants, MarchFirsts and Razorfishes even exist anymore?
-More and more, ‘consulting’ is coming to mean ‘IT Outsourcing’.
You may not have as many years in consulting as you thing.
i am enjoying these threads immensely.
how bout : tweaking the numbers
i guess it all boils down to a saying i heard:
If you can’t dazzle them with your brilliance, then baffle them with your bullshit.