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The Origins of Office Speak

What corporate buzzwords reveal about the history of work
(and what a corporate-buzzword quiz reveals about you)
By Emma Green
Illustrations by Jackie Lay
APRIL 24, 2014

“H
ere’s your ‘buzzword bingo’ card for the meeting,” Wally
says to Dilbert, handing him a piece of paper. “If the boss
! Facebook
uses a buzzword on your card, you check it off. The
objective is to fill a row.” " Twitter
They go to the meeting, where their pointy-haired boss presides. “You’re # LinkedIn
all very attentive today,” he observes. “My proactive leadership must be
working!” $ Google+
“Bingo, sir,” says Wally. % Email
This 1994 comic strip by Scott Adams is a perfect caricature of office speak: & 25 Comments
An oblivious, slightly evil-seeming manager spews conceptual,
meaningless words while employees roll their eyes. Yet, even the most
cynical cubicle farmers are fluent in buzzwords. An email might be full of
calisthenics, with offers to “reach out,” “run it up the flagpole,” and
“circle back.” There are nature metaphors like “boil the ocean” and
“streamline,” and food-inspired phrases like “soup to nuts” and “low-
 hanging fruit.” For the fiercest of office workers, there’s always the violent
imagery of “pain points,” “drilling down,” and “bleeding edge.”

Over time, different industries have developed their own tribal

vocabularies. Some of today’s most popular buzzwords were created by
academics who believed that work should satisfy one’s soul; others were
coined by consultants who sold the idea that happy workers are effective
workers. The Wall Street lingo of the 1980s all comes back to “the bottom
line,” while the techie terms of today suggest that humans are creative
computers, whose work is measured in “capacity” and “bandwidth.”
Corporate jargon may seem meaningless to the extent that it's best
described as “bullshit,” but it actually reveals a lot about how workers
think about their lives.

ter, from endless emails and instant

and break-room rendezvous. The way we
about how we view our jobs, and these
y rooted in history. Answer the questions
e about how the words you use every day
nk about your job.

Start!
you feel?
Your boss emails you late at night. How do
Happy for an opportunity to “lean in.”

Frustrated

T
he mechanistic worker came of age amid a whirl of turbines at the
turn of the century. The Second Industrial Revolution was well
underway, and the massive companies run by titans like Andrew
Carnegie and Henry Ford relied on factory assembly lines.

In 1911, Frederick Winslow Taylor published The Principles of Scientific

Management, a book with one goal: destroy worker inefficiency. His theory,
often called “Taylorism,” was all about maximizing every action on an
assembly line. “There was a shift to the logic of science and efficiency,”
Rakesh Khurana, a professor at Harvard Business School and soon-to-be-
dean of Harvard College, told me. “Divide work into its smallest
component parts, figure out the timing, remove any unnecessary
efficiencies. That was the way work was organized, and that had a huge
impact on the way corporate culture was organized.” The words used to
talk about workers in books and boardrooms were accordingly mechanistic,
emphasizing accuracy, precision, incentives, and maximized production.

This idea started to shift in the late 1920s and ’30s. In 1924, the Australian
sociologist George Elton Mayo started running a series of experiments at
Hawthorne Works, a large factory of the Western Electric Company in the
 suburbs of Chicago. He set out with a simple task: figure out how the
Ford assembly line workers circa 1913
brightness of the lights in the factory
affected worker productivity. But his
team got some surprising results:
Whenever the lights changed—no matter
whether they got dimmer or brighter—
workers got better at their jobs. They
concluded that the workers’ physical
environment wasn’t what made them
better—it was that they thought their
bosses were paying attention to them.

Mayo and his team quickly changed their focus: Instead of thinking of
workers as cogs in a vast machine, they began thinking of them as living
units of a large, complex social organism.

“In the 1930s, you begin getting this human relations perspective, in many
ways in opposition to the scientific imagery,” Khurana said. “This is really
about this notion that managers don’t understand the psychology of
workers. By treating them as machines, they not only deny their
humanity; it actually results in ineffective management, social
disorganization, lack of cooperation, and an increase in tensions between
labor and management.” Although the methodology of the Hawthorne
experiment has since been criticized, the results triggered a shift in how
researchers thought about workers.

This seemed to come at just the right time: The Great Depression had set
in, and industries were in an existential crisis. “Alienation, abseentism,
labor turn-over, wild-cat strikes—these came to be associated not with
meeting the workers’ economic needs, but their psychological and social
needs,” Khurana said.
World War II liberated these theories from the halls of academia. Suddenly,
organizational science was seen as a possible tool for understanding what
had happened to nations like Germany and Japan. “What was it about the
culture of those societies that led them to suddenly shift from what was
seen as quite enlightened and advanced to suddenly becoming very
authoritarian? The government became interested in this, and they started
funding all sorts of studies.”

Employees had been seen as lazy work-haters instead

of ambitious self-motivators.

At the same time, American companies were changing. “Most of the large
organizations that were emerging at this time were not in any single
business,” Khurana said. “They were large, diversified conglomerates that
had been created as a consequence of World War II and of the huge mergers
and acquisitions activity that took place in the 1950s and ’60s. Firms like
Pepsico owned trucking companies, even though they were in the food
business.”

This made it more difficult for workers to feel a connection to their

companies, Khurana said. “What people were very much focused on was:
How can we get workers to feel differently about their jobs?”

For academics, this was as much a question of sociology as efficiency. It

soon became a question of money, too: “As a manager, how can I maximize
profits by creating a certain emotional atmosphere at my company?”

In trying to answer this question, office speak was born.

 The Self-Actualizers

In the 1950s, two schools of thought began to emerge. At Carnegie Mellon,

academics were working on what they called management science—a
theory of decision-making inspired by the computers that had come out
during World War II. Meanwhile, at MIT, three professors—Douglas
McGregor, Edgar Schein, and Richard Beckhard—were creating a new field
called organizational development.

Schein, now 86, is largely credited with coining the term organizational
culture (the linguistic cousin of corporate culture). “In the 1960s, there
was an emphasis on humanistic psychology, involving the worker, because
then they would work better,” he told me. “We were interested in how
groups and leadership could be made more effective. So we started
something called the human relations lab.”

A pair of hypotheses rose out of these labs. As McGregor explained in his

1960 book The Human Side of Enterprise, managers could think of their
employees in one of two ways: as lazy work-haters who need to be closely
supervised (Theory X), or as ambitious self-motivators who thrive in an
atmosphere of trust (Theory Y). “This introduced the idea that effective
managers believe in their people and trust them and don’t feel that they
have to monitor them all the time,” Schein said.

Although the researchers didn’t

necessarily favor one theory over the
other, Theory Y fit perfectly with the
zeitgeist of the 60s. It drew on Abraham
Maslow’s increasingly popular theory of
the hierarchy of needs, which positioned
“self-actualization” as the highest goal
of human life. Inspired by Maslow,
Esalen Institute founders Michael Murphy
and Dick Price (esalen.org) Michael Murphy and Dick Price founded
the Esalen Institute in 1962 to nurture the
burgeoning Human Potential Movement, and Look magazine’s George
Leonard helped bring it into the mainstream. Theory Y extended this
worldview into the realm of work: Jobs, much like meditation and mind-
enhancing drugs, were seen as a way to discover untapped inner power and
find personal fulfillment. Over the years, the idea has stuck: In 2001, The
Human Side of Enterprise was voted the fourth most influential
management book in the 20th century by the Academy of Management.

In the decades that followed, academics continued to come up with

memorable buzzwords. British psychologist Raymond Cattell repurposed
the word synergy, which was originally a Protestant term for cooperation
between the human will and divine grace. The UC Berkeley philosopher
Thomas Kuhn popularized the term paradigm shift in his 1962 book, The
Structure of Scientific Revolutions. And, much later, Harvard professor
Clayton Christensen coined the term disrupt, which has become a favorite
in today’s climate of start-up worship. But more importantly, academics
have had a big effect on how workers work, all thanks to one group of
people: consultants.

The Optimizers

Douglas McGregor may have written the fourth most influential

management book of the 20th century, but Peter Drucker wrote the third:
In his 1954 manifesto, The Practice of Management, he wrote that “the
manager is the dynamic, life-giving element in every business.” Over the
next five decades, Drucker helped companies find new ways to turn
“resources”—people, in other words—into productivity engines.

In 1981, Drucker started working with one of his biggest clients: General
Electric. The company had just been taken over by Jack Welch, who was
looking to overhaul its management in the midst of a recession. Over the
next decade, Welch systematically redesigned the culture of the
organization, hitting a peak in 1989 with his Work-Out program, which was
designed to help managers and employees solve problems faster. In the
language of Work-Out, low-hanging fruit were problems that were easily
identified and solved. Other fantastic jargon from the program
included rattlers, or obvious problems (so-named because they “make a
lot of noise”) and pythons, or challenging problems that come from
bloated bureaucracy. A little ironically, Welch wrote that Work-Out would
create “a company where jargon and double-talk are ridiculed and candor
is demanded.”

Although Work-Out is credited with reinvigorating General Electric, other

attempts to overhaul company culture failed miserably. After AT&T was
broken up into multiple companies in 1984, the newly independent
telephone service provider Pacific Bell hired two associates of Charles
Krone, a California-based management consultant known for following
 the teachings of Armenian mystic Georges Gurdjieff. His “leadership
Jack Welch shares his business philosophy
with students at MIT's Sloan School of
Management. (Reuters)
development” program, known as
“kroning,” maintained that certain words
helped employees communicate better,
improving the health of the organization.
Some 23,000 employees went through the
$40 million training program, learning
new terms like task
cycle and functioning capabilities that
were supposed to help them care more
about their work and express themselves
more clearly.

Instead, the company’s language became incredibly opaque. For example,

its 1987 “statement of principles” defined “interaction” as:

The continuous ability to engage with the connectedness and

relatedness that exists and potentially exists, which is essential for
the creations necessary to maintain and enhance viability of ourselves
and the organization of which we are a part.

When the San Francisco Chronicle reported that the training had caused
widespread discontent, the California Public Utilities Commission started
an investigation, and the program was discontinued. “Perhaps one thing
that we learn from the Krone case,” wrote University of Richmond
professor Joanne Ciulla in 2004, “ is that attempts at engineering
appropriate attitudes and emotions can actually undercut genuine feelings
for a company.”

“The consulting industry came up with a whole slew of

euphemisms for firing people.”

But even if firms like Bain, McKinsey, and Boston Consulting Group didn’t
import New Age values into their consulting the way Krone and his
associates did, they did develop distinctive, pseudo-scientific language to
pitch themselves to clients. “They all had to come up with something
new,” John Van Maanen, a management professor at MIT, told me.

For example, consultants are responsible for a lot of the veiled language
used by today’s HR departments. “The consulting industry came up with a
whole slew of euphemisms for firing people that has become universal,”
said Matthew Stewart, the author of The Management Myth. “There’s a
whole body of kind of Orwellian speak about developing human capital and
managing people and all that.” Streamline, restructure, let
go, create operational efficiencies: All of these are roundabout ways of
saying that people are about to lose their jobs. The common theme among
them is efficiency—after all, these are human resources, and what are
resources for if not the company’s bottom line?
 Advertisement

This is where consultants diverge from their management-scientist

forefathers. They value worker satisfaction only to the extent that it can
help a company run better. Consider the following buzzwords:

80-20, noun: Named by a consultant for economist Vilfredo Pareto, this is

the principle that 80 percent of output comes from 20 percent of a
company’s effort.

Boil the ocean, verb: This is a term for unrealistic expectations, supposedly
coined by the humorist Will Rogers when he was asked what to do about
German U-Boat aggression during World War I.

Sync up, verb: Derived from the mechanical term “synchronization,”

this means “make sure everyone knows what’s going on.”

But consultant-speak wasn’t the only vocabulary trend of the 1970s and
’80s. Elsewhere in the business world, another kind of profit-driven jargon
was on the rise: the language of Wall Street.

The Financiers

“In finance, the jargon tends to be aggressive—kind of frat-bot talk. It’s

the same spirit: competitive and aggressive,” said Geoffrey Nunberg, a
linguistics professor at UC Berkeley. Often, the words thrown around in
emails and on trading floors are close cousins of those used in economic
 textbooks. In finance, even the buzzwords drip with money.

For publicly owned companies, this was a period of refocusing—on profit.

Concerns about worker satisfaction and “human potential” largely faded
from view; suddenly, business was all about rewarding the shareholder.
The economist Milton Friedman summed up this theoretical shift in a
1970 New York Times column: “There is one and only one social
responsibility of business—to use its resources and engage in activities
designed to increase its profits.”

This idea shaped the way managers and

Gordon Gekko (Michael Douglas) explains
why greed is good in the 1987 movie Wall
Street. (Twentieth Century Fox)
action directly increase profits for the people who own our company?”
employees thought and acted. And the
language followed suit. “The
expression optionality is something that
came into vogue with the rise of
derivatives,” said Stewart. “You can talk
about standard deviations or other terms
for establishing risk, like leverage. You
hear that term everywhere, but it was
originally a financial concept.” The
term value-add comes directly from the
idea of shareholder value: “Will this

As Wall Street grew more powerful, so did business schools. “In an

executive training or MBA program … everybody talks about the
multiplicity of networks: advice networks, mentoring networks,” Van
Maanen said. He also pointed to the proliferation of new terms in the
business press, like VUCA—a finance-world adaptation of a military
acronym for Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, and Ambiguity. Terms like
this, Van Maanen said, “create a bit of an in-group—a divide between
those who can use it knowledgably [and those who can’t].”

This observation holds true across professions: A well-placed buzzword is a

great way to claim membership in a certain tribe. But for marketers,
there’s another useful application for office jargon: establishing a
#personal #brand.
 The Marketers

Marketing is having a glamour moment in pop-culture, largely thanks to

the Emmy-winning show Mad Men, now in its seventh season. The 1960s
brought us phrases like run it up the flagpole, a term for testing out the
popularity of a brand or product, and hard-sell, a shorthand for aggressive
strategies designed to get consumers to buy products in the near future.

Advertising gurus later came up with a series of Jedi-esque terms,

including mind share, or the amount of attention consumers pay to
specific, famous brands like Hoover or Coca-Cola; ideation, or the ability
to come up with effective new ideas; and native solutions, or ads that look
like something else—an article, for
instance.

Mad MenBut today,

Roger everyone’s
Sterling an advertiser—for
(John Slatterly) and himself. The idea of
Don Draper (Jon Hamm) embody the golden a personal brand has been around for
age of marketing. (AMC)
several decades; self-help guru Tom
Peters wrote a long article on the topic for Fast Company in 1997. The
Internet has taken this to a whole new level. Workers are imminently
Google-able; potential employers now have a Sauron-like gaze over the
workforce. On the other hand, people can also advertise their skills using
personal websites, Twitter feed, or, occasionally, clever YouTube videos. In
a job market increasingly dependent on part-time employment and
contract work, selling yourself may be the only way to survive.

Twitter memes like #brands and #leanin hover

between irony and earnest identification.
Arlie Hochschild, a Berkeley sociologist and author of books like The Second
Shift and The Managed Heart, explained how personal branding changes the
way workers see themselves. “It gets you to focus on how you seem to
others, that you come alive only as you are seen externally,” she said. “It
draws attention to your feelings toward your external self, and draws
attention way from your internal self.” It also blurs the boundaries of
private life. “Work becomes home, home becomes work.”

And language has followed this trend. Social media makes it easy to merge
personal and professional identities; Twitter memes like #brands and
#leanin hover between irony and earnest identification. It’s especially
virtuous to be a self-described thought leader.

The Disruptors

The ultimate Silicon Valley virtue is embodied in one

buzzword: disrupt. Coined by Harvard Business School professor Clayton
Christensen in 1995, it refers to new technologies that are powerful enough
to change the way an entire sector operates. This is the dream behind every
start-up: that what it builds becomes the next Facebook or Windows or
iPod, a product that will infiltrate consumer life and demolish competitors.
Even companies that have nothing to do with apps and hardware aspire to
Mark Zuckerberg’s now-famous adage: “Move fast, break things.”
 Google Ngrams

Terms like bandwidth, hack, multi-task, and download have migrated

well beyond the nerd hub of San Francisco. “For a long time, people tried
to grow the next Silicon Valley,” said AnnaLee Saxenian, a Berkeley
professor and author of Regional Advantage: Culture and Competition in
Silicon Valley and Route 128. During the heyday of the auto-industry,
corporate values were all about stability and output. In contrast, Saxenian
said, “The Silicon Valley model does best in unstable, volatile,
unpredictable environments. It’s very flexible and adaptive, but it’s not
necessarily the most efficient model—and now, we talk
about innovation rather than efficiency.”

Silicon Valley culture also represents a power shift in the workforce.

Whereas corporations are hierarchical, start-ups are more horizontal than
vertical. “The corporate model was a very top-down one—everyone
says bottom-up now,” Saxenian said. The names for workers have
changed, too: Although the use of “industrialist” has plummeted since its
peak in the 1950s, words like entrepreneur and venture capitalist have
seen a steep rise since the 1980s.

The Creatives
Silicon Valley has a close cousin in the new class of makers and creatives.
These are the tinkerers who spend their days in makerspaces, the artists
who make their livelihoods on Etsy, the 3-D printer acolytes who hope to
democratize the entire world of production. Their habits can be
caricatured, just like any other work tribe: They make their own bread;
they have their own sustainable gardens; they revel in DIY.

In many ways, these values are the same as Silicon Valley’s: a desire to
build things and empower individuals, along with a distaste for centralized
workplaces. This new way of working may be taking over in certain self-
contained communities: Kevin Kelly, the founding editor of Wired, wrote in
the introduction to his 2013 book Cool Tools that “a third industrial
revolution is stirring—the Maker era.” But as of 2011, 82 percent of
private-sector jobs were at companies with more than 20 employees.
Managers still have enormous control over the language and culture of
office life.

The Life Hackers

Even in traditional offices, “the lingua franca of corporate America has

gotten much more emotional and much more right-brained than it was 20
years ago,” said Harvard Business School professor Nancy Koehn. She
started spinning off examples. “If you and I parachuted back to Fortune
500 companies in 1990, we would see much less frequent use of terms
like journey, mission, passion. There were goals, there were strategies,
there were objectives, but we didn’t talk about energy; we didn’t talk
about passion.”

Koehn pointed out that this new era of corporate vocabulary is very
“team”-oriented—and not by coincidence. “Let’s not forget sports—in
male-dominated corporate America, it’s still a big deal. It’s not explicitly
conscious; it’s the idea that I’m a coach, and you’re my team, and we’re in
this together. There are lots and lots of CEOs in very different companies,
but most think of themselves as coaches and this is their team and they
want to win.”

These terms are also intended to infuse work with meaning—and, as

Khurana points out, increase allegiance to the firm. “You have the
importation of terminology that historically used to be associated with
non-profit organizations and religious organizations: Terms like vision,
values, passion, and purpose,” said Khurana.

If your work is your “passion,” you’ll be more likely to

devote yourself to it, even if that means working long
after the kids are in bed.

This new focus on personal fulfillment can help keep employees motivated
amid increasingly loud debates over work-life balance. The “mommy
wars” of the 1990s are still going on today, prompting arguments
about why women still can’t have it all and books like Sheryl
Sandberg’s Lean In, whose title has become a buzzword in its own right.
Terms like unplug, offline, life-hack, bandwidth, and capacity are all
about setting boundaries between the office and the home. But if your
work is your “passion,” you’ll be more likely to devote yourself to it, even if
that means going home for dinner and then working long after the kids are
in bed.

Luke Visconti, the CEO and founder of Diversity Inc, points out that the
language used to talk about race, class, and sexual orientation has also
changed. “When we first started our publication in 1997, it was diversity,
and then it became diversity and inclusion. Detractors will call it political
correctness or whatever they want, but the real emphasis revolves
around talent development. The language of equity and outcome is
important.”

Advertisement

Of all the different kinds of office speak, diversity talk is probably toughest
to untangle. It’s easy to make fun of buzzwords like engagement,
dialogue, recognition, experience, awareness, education. Everyone I
spoke with recognized that there’s a certain amount of eye-rolling that
comes with diversity trainings—“talk of yellow people and purple people, ! Facebook
that sort of thing,” quipped Shawna Vican, a doctoral candidate who is
" Twitter
studying organizational change at Harvard.
"
But this seems to be the irony of office speak: Everyone makes fun of it,
# LinkedIn
but managers love it, companies depend on it, and regular people willingly $ Google+
absorb it. As Nunberg said, “You can get people to think it’s nonsense at
the same time that you buy into it.” In a workplace that’s fundamentally % Email
indifferent to your life and its meaning, office speak can help you figure
out how you relate to your work—and how your work defines who you are.
& 25 Comments

Emma Green is an associate editor at The Atlantic, where she

oversees the National Channel, manages TheAtlantic.com’s
homepage, and writes about religion and culture.
ALL POSTS ( Follow @emmaogreen

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Sam Cel Roman • a day ago

i was with you right up until the last got d***ed sentence…. whew that was NOT what I was
expecting.
7 • Reply • Share ›

Carl Mod Sam Cel Roman • 21 hours ago

I dunno what Emma's talking about. The Atlantic's office culture isn't "impersonal" or
"soulless": http://theatlantic.com/video/i...
• Reply • Share ›

99Luftballons Carl • 17 hours ago

Carl, that guy in the video seemed worse than "soulless" and "impersonal,"
almost a zombie, except a zombie has way more personality. No wonder he
was eating alone. He was so tiresome to watch. I had to exercise discipline
not to switch to the Moab desert video. I kept on waiting for some humor.
Maybe at The Atlantic they recognize him as a early-phase pre-zombie? Oh, I
 Maybe at The Atlantic they recognize him as a early-phase pre-zombie? Oh, I
guess that was your joke! Though the start of the video seems to indicate The
Atlantic office culture is driven, exploitative and mind-numbing. Except when
they get out the olive oil to cook some interns. I guess the pre-zombie just
needs some intern brains and olive oil to generate some excitement.

The Moab video, on the other hand, was fantastic.

• Reply • Share ›

herpderp • 21 hours ago

As someone about to transition from academia to corporate america, this is an interesting
piece. I was just thinking, I'm going to have to learn an all new workplace vernacular.
5 • Reply • Share ›

Bonegirl06 herpderp • 20 hours ago

Really? Because I hear this stuff in academia all the time....
1 • Reply • Share ›

M Rob Bonegirl06 • 18 hours ago

Each academic field has it's own buzzwords and jargon, but the ones listed in
the article I have only heard from the mouth's of MBA professors. Science
and engineering professors mostly hate it when useful technical jargon
(capacity, bandwidth, synergy) are watered down by business people until the
words are so vague in meaning as to be useless.

The author might want to dig deeper on the origin of some of these words:
"The term synergy comes from the Greek word synergia !"#$%&'() from
synergos, !"#'%&*+, meaning "working together"." - wikipedia
• Reply • Share ›

Bonegirl06 M Rob • 17 hours ago

I was thinking more along the lines of administrators who talk like this
to faculty and staff, not the more localized jargon that permeates
academic fields. I've gone to more than one HR event where these
words are prevalent.
3 • Reply • Share ›

therantguy • 20 hours ago

Ideate isn't a word...anyone who uses it in my presence better be prepared to get an
earful....

PS - The quiz (like most quizzes) is absurd. Forcing people to choose options when I'd
choose none of them is just poor design.
18 • Reply • Share ›

IowaBeauty therantguy • 15 minutes ago

If you're going to give anyone an earful over their use of words, you should at least
base your rants on something with a kernel of truth. However, unfortunately for you,
"ideate" appears as a verb in the Oxford English Dictionary, with recorded use in the
17th century by John Donne. It's been in circulation ever since.
• Reply • Share ›

Geenius_at_Wrok • 20 hours ago

I couldn't get past question 5 of that quiz.
• Reply • Share ›

Kend99 Geenius_at_Wrok • 12 hours ago

I agree. After two or three where I wanted to answer "none of the above" I gave up.
1 • Reply • Share ›

Geenius_at_Wrok • 20 hours ago

In our time it is broadly true that political writing is bad writing. Where it is not true, it will
generally be found that the writer is some kind of rebel, expressing his private opinions
and not a 'party line.' Orthodoxy, of whatever color, seems to demand a lifeless, imitative
style. . . . In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the
 indefensible. —George Orwell

Make that "political and corporate," and you're on to something.

"But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought. A bad usage can
spread by tradition and imitation even among people who should and do know better."
5 • Reply • Share ›

99Luftballons • 17 hours ago

The article states:

80-20, noun: Named by a consultant for economist Vilfredo Pareto, this is the principle
that 80 percent of output comes from 20 percent of a company’s effort.

Actually, other popular business meanings are:

* 80% of the value produced comes from 20% of the employees.

* 80% of sales come from 20% of sales reps.

* 80% of the value produced comes from 20% of an individual's activities.

* 80% of profits come from 20% of customers.

* 80% of profits come from 20% of products or services.

* 80% of problems are caused by 20% of defects.

see more

3 • Reply • Share ›

DavidWNaas • 16 hours ago

I have a Newspeak Dictionary for loan. It is doubleplus good for duckspeakers.
2 • Reply • Share ›

Jacob Adam • 16 hours ago

This article makes office lingo seem darkly planned out, constructed for a purpose, inserted
or imposed. In my own experience office lingo is a form of slang that catches on and
circulates organically. Some office speak may be "planted" by managers or consultants with
an agenda, but I think most of it only catches on to the extent that it's how the cool kids are
talking a couple of cubical over.
1 • Reply • Share ›

Kend99 Jacob Adam • 12 hours ago

I don't know that consultants have much of an agenda other than billing as much as
possible for a three and a half day work week.
• Reply • Share ›

Overburdened_Planet • 13 hours ago

How about "grab your ankles"?

Maybe that was only in my office.

2 • Reply • Share ›

madjakk • 13 hours ago

"For all the ostensible objectivity and scientific rigor of the magazine’s questing spirit, The
Atlantic’s definition of talent seems to correlate to: a current fellowship at the New America
Foundation or any of the other indistinguishably centrist think tanks, though, preferably, one
with a brand (i.e., “Daniel Indiviglio is the 2011 Robert Novak Fellow at the Philips
Foundation”); an ability to channel one’s talent into the mastery of meritless and
preposterous (“counterintuitive”) arguments, deliberately obtuse rebuttals, and
miscellaneous pseudointellectual equivocation/noise on topical issues; and proven senior-
level mastery of aforementioned mastery as demonstrated either by radical shamelessness
or the pious and deeply felt earnestness of a motivational speaker."

http://www.thebaffler.com/past...
 http://www.thebaffler.com/past...

• Reply • Share ›

AlbertoinDumbo • 12 hours ago

http://bullshitbingo.net/
1 • Reply • Share ›

marathag • 12 hours ago

Welch systematically redesigned the culture of the organization, hitting
a peak in 1989 with his Work-Out program, which was designed to help
managers and employees solve problems faster

I thought he did fast problem solving by firing vast numbers of employees.

1 • Reply • Share ›

Jonathan Wells • 12 hours ago

I didn't understand most of this article, and was primarily frustrated that the author didn't
bother to define any of the terms bandied about. The quiz sucked, because I don't know
what any of the terms meant and never use them. I'm glad I don't work in an office like the
ones described here.
• Reply • Share ›

Mabool • 11 hours ago

Gluts, pelfs, gamuts, hoards, troves, spates, gobs, oodles, scads, slews, bevies, passels,
welters, wads, surfeits and plethoras.
• Reply • Share ›

Daria Disqus • 11 hours ago

When I hear corporate speak I wonder how honest the person is; how much they think
things through; how selective they are and other ideas that are not flattering to the speaker.
2 • Reply • Share ›

Nathan Zebrowski • 11 hours ago

There is no irony of office speak. It is not that we buy into it even while we know it's
nonsense. It's rather that we are are forced into it. Attending "training" is not optional.
Adopting the approved language is not done by "choice" or because we buy in. It's done
because we want to keep our jobs, get our raises, compete for promotions, keep our health
benefits, support our children--and the lunatics have the asylum. It's mind-numbing and
actually painful and morale-killing to listen to consultants who know nothing about on the
ground reality in an organization come in with their jargon and imported, completely
inappropriate plans. Mind-numbing and painful to watch our CEOs and leaders parrot the
nonsense. However, it is the groundless reality. It's pitiful, not ironic.
7 • Reply • Share ›

Ari • 7 hours ago

I hate fake words like "life hack". It's just called "getting a life" and telling your boss to get
one too.
• Reply • Share ›

PunkRockOldLady • 7 hours ago

Another big non-profit buzzword is "mission" but it doesn't bother me because it actually
means something, at least at my non-profit employer. Truly, though, I had trouble with that
quiz because I don't say any of those things.
• Reply • Share ›

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