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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. These include "think outside the box" or "paradigm shift" which, one assumes, are terms meant to make the speaker appear visionary or inspirational.

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. They were only too happy to chime in, and CNBC.com e-mail inboxes overflowed with responses.

Read ahead and find out what they had to say, and what you should never say around them.

1. Ping

John Nordell/Staff/FIle
The Dilbert board game

  • By Daniel Bukszpan CNBC

In office parlance, to "ping" means to e-mail, text or otherwise get in touch with someone. According to Jeff Logan, director of marketing at Dexas International in Coppell, Texas, an offer to "ping you back" is actually a passive-aggressive way to get rid of you.

"I'm pretty certain if someone offers to ping you back, they are not looking for a voice-to-voice conversation, but a text or an e-mail that is more easily avoidable," he said.

Other unpopular terms for "contact" include "reaching out" and "putting out feelers." 

All workers have terms that especially bother them.  Heddi Cundle, founder and CEO of the San Francisco-based travel gift card company MyTab, has such a term that she loathes —"go big or go home." She hates it so much, in fact, that her employees are forbidden to use it, and she keeps a snappy retort on hand for anyone unfortunate enough to utter it within earshot.

"I tell them to cough up funding so we can go big," she said. "If they balk at this, I usually tell them to go home."

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Mark Sappenfield
Editor

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.”

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