Don't Be Deceived! The List Of Annoyingly Common Corporate Buzzwords
Posted: Thursday, October 30, 2008
by Franz Bonaparta
The corporate world is one where nothing is as it seems. Like any culture it is filled with terms and languages of its own that people who have no exposure to could find confusing. Many bosses also tend to hide their motives and actions with fancy sounding words that mask certain intentions that would otherwise sound very threatening. It's a pretty confusing state of affairs but surprisingly many of these corporate buzzwords and catchphrases have filtered into our everyday usage.
l Thought Leadership: A thought leader is one who states obvious facts for everyone during meetings and gets praised by the boss. I guess that grand ideas are hard to come by especially when meetings are scheduled at such short notice. Far from proposing groundbreaking ideas, many thought leaders who are usually bosses themselves, just lift quotations from business books.
l Float: Don't you notice that companies don't use the word 'fire' or even 'retrench' anymore? They would instead use words like 'downsize' or 'rightsize'. Corporations have also made a new term for those employees who have been pulled from the line of duty called 'float'. This would entail letting the employee stay for a while until a new position opens. They say it decreases recruitment costs but only at the expense of company morale.
l Competitive Advantage: This is one of the favorite words of executives in almost every company. It refers to the profits and reputation enjoyed by a certain company as opposed to those of other companies. It's also used in the most mundane of things and in the worst ways ever. As long as there is anything that can be competed over this term will continue to be used-to death.
These are only a few of those deceptively boring and commonplace words that have come from the cut-throat world of corporations to infect our everyday lives. If you want a list of those banal corporate words that you'd best be wary about, just visit: http://crunkish.com/careers/ .
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