Once, the following terms were new and fresh. But, as everyone starts using them, abusing them, they become overused, they become ignored.
These words actually make it harder for people to understand you – which is ironic because they originally were meant to do the opposite.
Audit, tax and advisory services firm Grant Thornton recently compiled an index of 120 trending business buzzwords based on Fortune 500 company websites, the language they used on social media and common phrases in business journalism in the first quarter of 2018.
Such is the pace of language development, the terms almost spark the idea of the opposite meaning when we see them. “Best in class” was the number one buzzword in the first quarter, with other 71,000 uses.
Use them at your peril.
Top 20 Biz Buzzwords 2018
1 Best in class 71,729 Q1 uses
2 Value add 56,659
3 Game changer 48,862
4 Action plan 28,863
5 One the same page 26,333
6 Game plan 25,291
7 Thought leadership 22,956
8 Brainstorm 21,155
9 Price point 20,988
10 Organic growth 20,983
11 Deep dive 19,103
12 Customer centric 17,360
13 In the pipeline 13,791
14 Hit the ground running 11,456
15 Moving parts 11,200
16 Bring to the table 10,189
17 Bang for your buck 9,950
18 Laser focused 8,394
19 Move the needle 8,325
20 In the driver’s seat 8,055
Thank you for this piece Peter. The ‘good news” is that there’s a very simple test for the utility of such glib language. A test that all your twenty examples fail in a heart-beat, and which can be used to as quickly assess any future such gibberish. What is it?
Go behind New Zealand farm gates and talk to the farmers you find there. Test the latest fashionable MBA/Consultancy speak on them. If they look bemused you have your warning.
Some phrases, e.g. “in the pipeline”, “hit the ground running” and “in the drivers seat” do have meaning behind the farm gate, but it’s their original meaning, not what they’ve been hijacked to become.