Put that jargon to good use . . .
Looking for a way to make all those meetings less mind numbing? Turn them into a creative, brain-building exercise with a game I call Word Quest. The only thing you need to play is an accomplice.
For Word Quest, you and your accomplice pick one clichéd, meaningless business term—such as managing expectations—and see who can be the first to use that term in a meeting. That person earns the most points. Bonus points are given if you get someone else (not your accomplice) to say the term in the meeting. Of course, you can give extra points for style when someone does a particularly good job working the term into the meeting.
Get started with these terms and sample sentences:
Deliverables
Sorry I’m late. I’ve been actioning my deliverables.
Core competency
Writing is clearly not one of your core competencies.
Manage expectations
The project is already six months behind. Is now a good time to start managing expectations?
Incentivize
How can I incentivize you to proofread your own work?
Ideate
No one is leaving this meeting until we ideate about the new ad campaign.
Reverbiagize
We don’t need to rewrite the entire proposal. Just have Sean reverbiagize it.
Throw under the bus
Watch what you say to Casey in customer support. He would throw his own mother under the bus.
Bandwidth
I just don’t have the bandwidth to take on another writing project right now.
Low-hanging fruit
It hardly seems fair. Josh gets all the low-hanging fruit.
Exit strategy
My exit strategy is to sit close to the door.
Drill down
How can I drill down when I’m stuck in meetings all day?
Elevator pitch
Have we actually tested the elevator pitch in an elevator?
Value proposition
Let’s try to keep the “value” in our value proposition.
Liaise
You and I need to liase about that project after this meeting.
Drink the Kool-Aid
Send Sarah to that client meeting. She can persuade anyone to drink the Kool-Aid.
And my personal favorite . . .
Open the kimono
We need to open the kimono and find out what’s going on in that department.
What I find the most enjoyable about Word Quest is how easily these terms are accepted in meetings. Where else but a meeting room would it be perfectly acceptable to say something like, “It’s time to drill down, use our core competencies, and grab some of that low-hanging fruit”?
Readers, care to share your own Word Quest terms?
This article was first published on Ragan Communication’s PR New Daily.
Referring to a person as a “creative” and all manner of turning nouns into verbs:
“Can you ballpark that?”
“I was just FYIing you on that email.”
Makes my head hurt . . .
Is it intentional that your last name does not appear on your professional experience or about pages? And there seems to be no obvious way on your web site to reach you directly by e-mail.
Bill
Thanks for the comments Bill. I have added this information to my site . . .didn’t realize it needed to be there until someone pointed it out.