Corporate Jargon Quotes

When corporate executives get really excited, they leverage their learnings against comprehension to revolutionize English.

Ectoplasmic plane? What the devil is that? (Simone) It’s jargon from those of us who are corporeally challenged. It’s the great beyond where we bounce into each other like floundering atoms. It’s really kind of gross – which is why I hang out with you. But only because you’re less gross than they are. (Jesse)

Kets de Vries confirmed that language is a critical clue when determining if a company has become too cultish for comfort. Red flags should rise when there are too many pep talks, slogans, singsongs, code words, and too much meaningless corporate jargon, he said.

Where once universities, corporations, movie studios, and the like had been governed by a combination of relatively simple chains of command and informal patronage networks, we now have a world of funding proposals, strategic vision documents, and development team pitches—allowing for the endless elaborations of new and ever more pointless levels of managerial hierarchy, staffed by men and women with elaborate titles, fluent in corporate jargon, but who either have no firsthand experience of what it's like to do the work they are supposed to be managing, or who have done everything in their power to forget it.

Winning brands value customer experience over a slick sales funnel, and the cadence of an authentic human voice over legally-approved corporate jargon.

Reporters are trained to hate corporate jargon and to eliminate it, not to engage in it. We’re expected to be cynical and skeptical, not to be cheerleaders.

The room had all the trappings of corporate cosplay: walls lined with meaningless jargon posters (“Fail Fast,” “Think Lean,” “Sprint or Die!”), whiteboards no one had written on, and an “Agile Champion.

The idiots take over the final days of crumbling civilizations. Idiot generals wage endless, unwinnable wars that bankrupt the nation. Idiot economists call for reducing taxes for corporation and the rich and cutting social service programs for the poor. They project economic growth on the basis of myth. Idiot industrialists poison the water, the soil, and the air, slash jobs and depress wages. Idiot bankers gamble on self-created financial bubbles. Idiot journalists and public intellectuals pretend despotism is democracy. Idiot intelligence operatives orchestrate the overthrow of foreign governments to create lawless enclaves that give rise to enraged fanatics. Idiot professors, "experts", and "specialists" busy themselves with unintelligible jargon and arcane theory that buttresses the policies of rulers. Idiot entertainers and producers create lurid spectacles of sex, gore and fantasy. There is a familiar checklist for extinction. We are ticking off every item on it.

Having studied workplace leadership styles since the 1970s, Kets de Vries confirmed that language is a critical clue when determining if a company has become too cultish for comfort. Red flags should rise when there are too many pep talks, slogans, singsongs, code words, and too much meaningless corporate jargon, he said. Most of us have encountered some dialect of hollow workplace gibberish. Corporate BS generators are easy to find on the web (and fun to play with), churning out phrases like “rapidiously orchestrating market-driven deliverables” and “progressively cloudifying world-class human capital.” At my old fashion magazine job, employees were always throwing around woo-woo metaphors like “synergy” (the state of being on the same page), “move the needle” (make noticeable progress), and “mindshare” (something having to do with a brand’s popularity? I’m still not sure). My old boss especially loved when everyone needlessly transformed nouns into transitive verbs and vice versa—“whiteboard” to “whiteboarding,” “sunset” to “sunsetting,” the verb “ask” to the noun “ask.” People did it even when it was obvious they didn’t know quite what they were saying or why. Naturally, I was always creeped out by this conformism and enjoyed parodying it in my free time. In her memoir Uncanny Valley, tech reporter Anna Wiener christened all forms of corporate vernacular “garbage language.” Garbage language has been around since long before Silicon Valley, though its themes have changed with the times. In the 1980s, it reeked of the stock exchange: “buy-in,” “leverage,” “volatility.” The ’90s brought computer imagery: “bandwidth,” “ping me,” “let’s take this offline.” In the twenty-first century, with start-up culture and the dissolution of work-life separation (the Google ball pits and in-office massage therapists) in combination with movements toward “transparency” and “inclusion,” we got mystical, politically correct, self-empowerment language: “holistic,” “actualize,” “alignment.

Purpose is unencumbered by the punitive, legalistic associations of ethics and compliance. In a single word, it conveys the notion that meaning, impact, and values can act in mutually reinforcing ways. Still, unless purpose can be grounded somewhere concrete and practical, it’s at risk of becoming the latest iteration of confounding jargon about corporate responsibility.

It would be easy to make this purely about local authority budgets, but the privatisation of social care has cloaked the profession in a profit-making penumbra which at times seems to trump the welfare of those the sector is supposed to serve. For many of the companies that vie with each other for business, elderly people are first and foremost pound symbols on a balance sheet. The corporate jargon which permeates the sector reflects this avaricious raison d'être. Elderly people are 'clients', 'customers', and 'service users'. 'Patients' are a separate category of people for whom the NHS has to send a ambulance in emergencies.

The right and the left share another important assumption: that academic radicalism is genuinely subversive. Kimbal takes the radical claims of the academic left at face value. He does not object to the tenured radicals because they are more interested in tenure than in radicalism. He objects to them because, in his view, they use the security of their academic positions to attack the foundations of social order. [...] Now, instead of attempting to destroy our educational institutions physically, they are subverting them from within. No doubt, they would like to think so; but their activities do not seriously threaten corporate control of the universities. And, it is corporate control - not academic radicalism - that has corrupted our higher education. It is corporate control that has diverted social resources from the humanities into military and technological research; fostered an obsession with quantification that has destroyed the social sciences, replaced the English language with bureaucratic jargon, and created a top-heavy administrative apparatus, whose educational vision begins and ends with the bottom line.

In the eighties, the design community witnessed the great rise of “professionalism” (now a euphemism for the production of noninnovative but stylishly acceptable work—usually in corporate communications—coupled with very good fees). Along with “professionalism” came the “business consultant to the designers,” who proclaimed, “Design is a business.” This became the mantra of the eighties. The AIGA, along with other organizations and publications, produced seminars, conferences, and special magazine issues devoted to the business of design. These were followed by a plethora of design self-help books, which told you how to set up your own business, how to promote, how to speak correct business jargon, how to dress, how to buy insurance, and so on. There was nothing inherently wrong with this except for the subsequent confusion it caused. “Professional” work did look more professional, and corporate communications in general were visually improved. The level of design mediocrity rose. Also, practicing designers as a rule had previously been rather sloppy about running their businesses. They were easily taken advantage of, didn’t know how to construct proposals, and were generally more interested in designing than in minding the store, networking, or planning for the future. The business seminars did no harm, but the political and economic climate of the eighties in general, coupled with the pervasiveness of the “design is a business” hype, perverted the design community’s overall goal. The goal became money.

The idiots take over in the final days of crumbling civilizations. Idiot generals wage endless, unwinnable wars that bankrupt the nation. Idiot economists call for reducing taxes for corporation and the rich and cutting social service programs for the poor. They project economic growth on the basis of myth. Idiot industrialists poison the water, the soil, and the air, slash jobs and depress wages. Idiot bankers gamble on self-created financial bubbles. Idiot journalists and public intellectuals pretend despotism is democracy. Idiot intelligence operatives orchestrate the overthrow of foreign governments to create lawless enclaves that give rise to enraged fanatics. Idiot professors, “experts,” and “specialists” busy themselves with unintelligible jargon and arcane theory that buttresses the policies of the rulers. Idiot entertainers and producers create lurid spectacles of sex, gore, and fantasy.

To work at a remote company demanded great communication skills, and everyone had them. It was one of the great initial delights. Every corporation has the same platitudes for the importance of clear communication yet utterly fails to practice it. There was little jargon at Automattic. No “deprioritized action items” or “catalyzing of cross functional objectives.” People wrote plainly, without pretense and with great charm.

1031: Jargon for Section 1031 of the Internal Revenue Code, which allows a seller to delay paying taxes on a piece of real estate that is sold for a capital gain through an exchange for a more expensive piece of real estate. CORPORATION: Merely a legal document that creates a legal body without a soul. It’s not a big building or a factory or a group of people. Using it, the wealth of the rich is protected. FINANCIAL IQ: Financial intelligence that comes as a result of financial education. People with high financial IQ learn to use other people’s money to become rich. FINANCIAL LITERACY: The ability to read and understand financial statements, which allows you to identify the strengths and weaknesses of any business.

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