Let’s create our own business jargon

I have a love/hate relationship with bizspeak. I’m fascinated by the way phrases enter our lexicon, become popular, then die off. But I also get annoyed by hackneyed writing and lazy speech. Smart people usually fall back on cliches because they don’t have time to think of an original way to illustrate an idea, and that’s understandable.

Still, it sets my teeth on edge when I hear something like, “We’ll start at the 50,000 foot level, then do a core dump and a deep dive and brainstorm some value-add strategies to open the kimono.” David Meerman Scott does a great job skewering the phenomenon in his Gobbledygook Manifesto.

When I worked at Nortel, back in the late 20th century, there was a phrase in vogue that got used so confusingly that I’m convinced most people didn’t know what it meant. The phrase was sometimes rendered as “moving the goal posts” and sometimes as “moving the yard sticks.” Sometimes people said “moving the yard sticks” to indicate progress, as the ball moves forward on a football field. Others used “moving the goal posts” to mean the target had shifted after the project was underway.

Others used them interchangeably, or incorrectly, so that whenever anyone used either phrase, you had to stop and wonder if they meant it was a good thing or a bad thing.

The phrase I’m hearing a lot these days is “move the needle,” as in “do something to create a measurable impact.” Not too bad, all things considered. But let’s hop on it before we get sick of it. Can we come up with another phrase that will mean the same thing?

Here are some suggestions:

  1. Stuff the turkey
  2. Butter the muffin
  3. Inflate the balloon
  4. Squeeze the turnip
  5. Grate the cheese
  6. Raise the barn
  7. Float the armada
  8. Pickle the okra

Your ideas? We’ll decide on it, then start using it. We won’t tell anyone. We’ll see if other people start using it. It’ll be our secret.

photo by Amarillo Chuck