Six clichéd business terms that should be banned from the office

Every office worker knows at least one bit of clichéd business-speak that they would be happy to never hear again. Members of the business community were asked if there were any other sayings they hear around the boardroom (or the water cooler or the neighboring desk) that they found particularly egregious. Read ahead and find out what they had to say:

4. Right-sized

Gary Cameron/Reuters/File
Legal firm Hogan Lovells representative Nina LeClair (R) talks to U.S. military veteran applicant Jacob Wilkens (L) at a hiring fair for veteran job seekers and military spouses at the Verizon Center in Washington April 9, 2014.

In 2014, nobody gets fired any more. Your position may be eliminated, and you may no longer be with the company, but nobody will come out and say "you're fired." According to Michael W. Byrnes Jr., president of Byrnes Consulting in Kingston, Mass., that nasty term has been replaced by such impersonal euphemisms as "downsized" and "right-sized."

"The reality is that an organization is having a layoff or firings, and the term 'downsized' in some ways sugarcoats what is taking place," he said. "There should be a word that stands for 'let go by a company because the company is failing.' Something like 'corporate-failure-sized.'"

4 of 6

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.