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Management speak

Apart from the usual business jargon and gobbledygook (plenty of examples of which you will find elsewhere on this site), offices up and down the country, and indeed across the world, resound with corporate 'management speak', or 'marketing speak'.

Management speak is typically used to make something seem more impressive than it actually is.

Last year, a survey revealed that many staff who work for big corporate organisations find themselves using management speak as a way of disguising the fact that they haven't done their job properly. Some people think that it is easy to bluff their way through by using long, impressive-sounding words and phrases, even if they don't know what they mean.

Below is a list of some of our 'favourite' examples.

  • ballpark figure
  • be proactive not reactive
  • bring it to the table
  • mission critical
  • move the goalposts
  • think outside the box
  • blue-sky thinking
  • pushing the envelope
  • there is no 'I' in team
  • knowledge base
  • core competencies
  • win-win situation
  • client focus
  • deliverables
  • incentivise
  • take it to the next level

We could go on and on. Please feel free to send us your own examples, and for a bit of fun, why not try the well-known game 'buzzword bingo'. Simply listen out for the buzzwords in your company meetings and ... BINGO!

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