65 Corporate Buzzword Jokes for People Who Have Circled Back

I asked my manager what synergy was. He said it was when two teams combine their meetings into one longer meeting.

We leveraged our learnings. Nobody knows where the learnings went, but the lever is still there.

She said she would circle back. That was in 2021. I assume she is still circling.

He suggested we take this offline. We were already offline. The Wi-Fi had been down for an hour.

Management told us to pick the low-hanging fruit. The tree had been picked clean by three prior reorgs.

Before the launch, we needed our ducks in a row. The ducks unionized.

We did a deep dive into the data. We surfaced with the same dashboard, slightly damper.

She asked me to drill down on the numbers. I went two levels deep and hit a pivot table from 2014.

He said the rebrand would move the needle. The needle moved. Sideways. Off the chart entirely.

We had to peel the onion on the customer pain point. Three layers in, we were all crying. Mission accomplished.

That topic went into the parking lot. The parking lot has its own parking lot now.

She said she did not have the bandwidth. Meanwhile her calendar was a solid wall of color blocks. Bandwidth: occupied.

We had eighteen months of runway. Then finance recalculated and we had eleven. Then six. Then a parking ticket.

Our north star metric changed in Q2. Also in Q3. And mid-Q3. It is now a constellation.

He pitched some blue sky thinking. The sky was a slide deck with no implementation plan.

We are pivoting. That is the fourth pivot this year. At this point we are just spinning.

It is a paradigm shift. Nobody has defined the old paradigm yet, but we have already moved on from it.

Leadership called it a win-win. Which team won the second win was never specified.

The ROI on the offsite was strong. Mostly in the form of branded fleece vests.

He described his contribution as a value-add. The value-add was an extra slide in an already-finalized deck.

Our KPI for the quarter was vague. It was defined as 'directional progress'. We are now directionally progressed.

We set OKRs in January. We reviewed them in November. Nobody had read them since February.

She said we needed alignment. We spent two hours aligning. Then a new exec joined and we re-aligned.

He referred to the customer as a stakeholder. The customer had no stake. The customer wanted a refund.

Ownership was unclear. So we created a working group to identify the owner. The working group has no owner.

Accountability is one of our core values. When we miss the target, however, we have a learning.

Working email is table stakes. Our email has been down since Tuesday. The table is wobbling.

He told me to double-click on that idea. I clicked once. Nothing happened. The idea was a Keynote rectangle.

We are ideating. Which is the past participle of 'pretending we are about to do something'.

There were seventeen action items from the meeting. Three had owners. Two had dates. None had verbs.

He sent a follow-up to the follow-up. The original email had been a follow-up. It is follow-ups all the way down.

She wanted to reach out. Reach was achieved. Out remains unmeasured.

He pinged me. I pinged back. We have now confirmed that both of our laptops are awake.

Let us touch base on Friday. Friday came. We touched no base. We rescheduled for next Friday.

Can we hop on a quick call. The call was 47 minutes. The hop was a marathon.

We sync every morning. We are still not in sync. We are, however, very tired.

I have a dotted line to product. The line is so dotted nobody can see it. Including product.

Our org is a matrix. Every employee has three managers and zero of them have read their job description.

We built a RACI for the project. Everyone is C. Nobody is R. The project is informed of its own failure.

He marked it ASAP. In his calendar, ASAP means 'eventually, possibly, if I remember'.

She sent it at EOD. Whose EOD remains a mystery. Three time zones are still waiting.

I need it by COB. Business has been closing for fourteen hours and nothing has shipped.

He cc'd me as an FYI. The FYI was a 600-line email thread I now apparently own.

She added me FYA. For my attention, I assume. Or possibly for my anxiety. Both work.

He signed every email with 'Best'. The best of what was never disclosed.

She wrote 'thanks in advance'. That is not a thank you. That is a deadline.

He replied 'per my last email'. Which is corporate for 'read it this time, I am begging you'.

She said 'let us unpack this'. We have been unpacking for forty minutes. The box was empty.

Can we level-set. We level-set. The level immediately changed. We re-level-set. Repeat.

He wanted to noodle on it. The noodling phase lasted six weeks. The decision was due in three days.

Let us marinate on that idea. It has now been marinating since the Q1 planning offsite. It is jerky.

She said we are aligned. I was not aligned. I had not spoken. I have been aligned to.

Are we aligned, he asked. No response is also a response. The answer was logged as yes.

I have a quick question, she said. Four Slack messages, two screenshots, and a Loom video later, I had a quick answer.

He said 'I will let you go'. He then talked for eleven more minutes. The letting-go has yet to occur.

We are not going to boil the ocean. We will, however, simmer it indefinitely without ever serving anything.

Does he have skin in the game. No. He has a slide in the deck.

That is not our core competency. Nobody has ever stated what our core competency is. We just know what it isn't.

She pointed at the white space on the slide. The white space was where the strategy was supposed to go.

He pitched a blue sky idea. It was raining outside. The metaphor was load-bearing.

Our secret sauce is our people. We also just laid off thirty percent of our people. The sauce is now mostly emulsifier.

Let us take a step back, he said. We stepped back so far we ended up in last quarter's roadmap.

She wanted a quick win. We shipped it in nine months. Quick by enterprise standards.

It is a stretch goal. The stretch was so aggressive the goal pulled a hamstring.

He used the word 'thought-leader' unironically. I nodded. There was nothing to be done.

We have a culture of feedback, he said. The feedback only flows one direction. That direction is 'down'.