“Eating your own dog food” and other buzzwords we need to nix

On-brand but completely fresh.

Customer centric.

Churning anomalies.

Sound like your last quarterly meeting? Nah. These are the first three phrases that came out of a lorem ipsum generator for office-speak.

I think we’ve read our fair share of pleas to ban corporate buzzwords from our office vocabulary in favour of good ol’ plain English. Entire books have been written on the subject. So why do they seem more prevalent than ever, especially in start-up and corporate culture?

Back in 2007, Seth Godin created an encyclopedia of buzzwords (though it’s no longer online) based on the idea that, “I think they exist to hide. By providing a layer of insulation between what you say and the truth, you can avoid saying what you mean, avoid confrontation and avoid change.”

The reasons for the push are sound and sensible. Buzzwords have a habit of getting misinterpreted, being overused, sounding insincere, overcomplicating what we’re trying to say, and as Seth points out, lacking real meaning.

Yet, buzzwords have a funny habit of sticking around

Inc.com has a list of 20 buzzwords we should keep using, even if we hate them. There are good reasons for this, too:

• A colourful metaphor can help make a message more memorable.
• Others may expect us to speak this way and judge us poorly for not doing so.
• Some terms have enormous momentum outside of what we can control.
• They’re based on trends, much like slang, and make us seem up-to-date.
• Sometimes we just need to use technical language to get our jobs done.

We’re pulled in two directions: we have great intentions to ditch the buzzspeak, but we still feel the need to use it in our professional conversations.

So what are we doing about it?

Business Bullshit author André Spicer identifies three common responses we resort to when we consider the problem of buzzwords:

1. We laugh about it.
2. We use it for our own ends.
3. We try to ban it.

The common outcome of those three responses? Nothing happens. That’s because, he argues, the real solution is in “addressing the wider economy of bullshit.”

“In best-case scenarios, this management piffle can crowd out more-important issues,” he writes. “At its worst, companies begin to believe their own bullshit, resulting in entire strategies based on a fantasy.”

For that, the solution lies with how an organization conducts itself. Things like making sure roles are meaningful, basing plans and decisions on evidence, and requiring leadership to actively participate in the projects their decisions affect.

As far as I can tell, no organization has ever managed to eliminate buzzwords from its corporate lexicon; I’m not holding out hope, either. I’d like to be proven wrong.

Buzzwords outside of the conference room

I’ve been doing quite a bit of research in new topics and industries, and I’ve noticed myself highlighting jargon words and terms I come cross.

“Design point,” “swarm ball,” “degrees of process,” and “powered by technology” are among my favourites so far this month.

Are any of these examples things we’d say, in real life, to another human, outside of a conference room?

I tested a few out on my mom, just for fun. “I thought a swarm ball was about a bunch of bees,” she said. (It actually refers to the attention new technology gets from employees in a company – they swarm around it excitedly, but sadly don’t always think about whether it’s needed.)

She’s not exactly a technical or corporate audience, so I sent some to a friend who works for a financial services company. “My condolences,” he wrote. “How did humans learn to talk like that?”

I’m going to answer my own questions with a resounding, “no.”

When buzzwords seep into regular words

I think half of the problem is that we conflate using corporate buzzwords with sounding professional and knowledgeable. Mission statements are perfect examples of that because they have the unbelievably heavy duty of summing up our businesses in a few short lines, for clients and shareholders alike. They’re also prone to skew corporate.

Here’s McDonald’s mission statement from 2013: “McDonald’s brand mission is to be our customers’ favorite place and way to eat and drink. Our worldwide operations are aligned around a global strategy called the Plan to Win, which center on an exceptional customer experience–People, Products, Place, Price and Promotion.”

This example pops up often as one to avoid because second line could apply to almost any company. It doesn’t really say much, aside from the fact they are a global company that has a strategy. “Worldwide operations”, “aligned with,” “global strategy,” “Plan to Win,” and “customer experience” are terms that don’t explain what McDonald’s actually does – they’re pretty empty, to borrow a thought from Seth Godin.

The other half of the problem? We just don’t think about how much we use buzzwords. We’re constantly switching between the email we’re sending out to that potential sponsor and that email campaign we’re sending out to clients. We’re so used to typing a certain way, and thinking a certain way, that it just doesn’t occur to us to do otherwise when we’re sitting at our desks.

The solution is simply this: be mindful. Comparing your content to a list of no-go words isn’t going to help, but sitting down and reading your work – really reading it, out loud if you’d like – with the intention to be as meaningful and human as possible is a good start.

Buzzwords to brighten your day

André Spicer wrote that laughing about our use of buzzwords is one classic way we’ve dealt with their overuse. There are lots of good examples of this out there:

• What office doesn’t have a Dilbert comic like this posted somewhere on a bulletin board?
• How about the TechCrunch pitch competition parodied in HBO’s Silicon Valley?
• Why not take a buzzword bingo card into your next meeting? (It’s “fun for the whole office!”)
• Slack bot SwearJar turns buzzwords into charitable donations.
• Weird Al even did a song about buzzwords. And it’s great.