What's In A Buzzword?

While helping my eldest with her homework I said she stood a better chance of success if she broke it down into snackable content and identified her mission-critical paradigms.   She looked at me like the idiot that I was (she gets more like her mother every day).  It was then I realised I had unwittingly succumbed to something I thought I had skilfully dodged in my professional life -  Business Schpeak.

At the peak of Britpop, I was a young intern at the Virgin Head Office.  I was in the retail sector and shadowing a store manager.  During an area meeting he said his main goal for the xmas period was to increase 'foot-traffic' in his store.  I laughed out loud and the room turned to look at me.  Sheepishly, I inquired 'Do you mean customers?'  He shot back  'At Virgin we call it 'foot-traffic'.  The serious tone of his voice and my eagerness to impress meant that I nodded approvingly but the absurdity of the term was not lost on me.  I made a promise to myself that I would never fall foul of this unnecessary linguistic expression.  But here we are, 20 years later, and I have just been admonished by a teenager for sounding like a pretentious candidate on The Apprentice.

I'm the man who would sit in business meetings and inwardly snigger as yet another facilitator extolled the virtues of deploying impactful functionalities.  Sometimes I genuinely didn't know what they were going on about (did they?) but I didn't want to appear out of the loop so I didn't question anything.  The back page of my notebook is littered with scribbles of words that I planned to look up later.  I wonder how many other notebooks have similar appendices?

My recent favourites have been ' identifying the low-hanging fruit' (easiest options) and 'delivering a helicopter view' (an overview - why not just say overview???!!!)  Helicopter view is utterly ridiculous.  Why do these educated, professional people not realise how silly they sound?  There appears to be no shame involved as they ridiculously discourse.  But perhaps they don't realise, I hadn't realised how much I'd picked up.  Frequenting different offices and regularly reading business articles had expanded my vocabulary too. 

After a short period of self-loathing on behalf of my former Virgin intern self, I decided to have some fun with it.  I created some buzzwords of my own.  In a recent meeting with a client where I had been brought in to evaluate their new business proposal, I said their plan was a 'Monet' (looked good on paper but up close it was just a mess) and the delivery of their pitch was a bit 'Honey Boo Boo' (sweet but incomprehensible). 

Nobody batted an upper-optical covering, in fact people were nodding in perceived affirmation.  Honestly, it's all a load of bovine excretion.

Dear Reader, I set you a challenge.  Invent your own business buzzword and drop it into your next meeting.  I'm absolutely certain that's how some were created, people were being sarcastic and ironic and inexplicably some stuck.  Tweet them to me and if I like them, I might use them in my next pitch.  twitter.com/mrbrianstory