September 15, 2010

Every Business Cliche in the Book

I love the radio ad from The Private Bank. It's a 60-second spot that spoofs big banks' (and business in general) tendency to speak in business cliches, and it's spot-on. Here's the text of it:

"Let’s touch base to arrange a little face time so we can appear fully engaged. Let’s be proactive, synergistic and leverage this thing. Better yet, let’s circle back and do a deep dive so we can empower a paradigm shift with a value added, team building, best of breed, Six Sigma, perfect storm that could go viral. And be scalable! It can be a loss leader, but let’s focus on the low hanging fruit. Also, look for change agents that generate robust ideation. Make sure the concept has legs and allows our stakeholders to focus on our core competencies with seamless integration. As for the action items and next steps? Well, we’re going to be proactive and bench mark the bottom line. That’s the bottom line-- in all candor. So that at the end of the day, we’re on plan, even if we’re off plan. We’ll have to manage up. Manage down. And manage expectations. Net-net: It’s a win-win. Got it? OK? Fantastic."

And here are some new ones I've heard lately:
Silo’d
Thought-leader
Touch points
Verticals
Nimble
Footprint
Do you have any more?

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I loathe "functionality". Why do we need that word, when we have good old "function" to serve that same purpose? "Functional" is the adjective formed by adding "-al" to "function", so why is there any need to transform "functional" back to a noun with the "-ity" suffix???

Samantha Hoffman said...

Excellent point. And...why do we need to turn nouns into verbs? For example, "Do you Kasasa?" It's an ad campaign for a bank. "Do you Kohls?" It's a department store. Both are nouns. Do we really need to pretend they're verbs?
Why?