“Thinking Outside the Box”, and Other Business Cliches that Must Die

During our off-site planning meetings at MullerOver headquarters, we set out to find the low hanging fruit, next gen viral ideas, and synergies to create  a win-win, cutting-edge, eco-friendly environment. Smitty, our office manager, broke free from the business-speak hypnosis and pointed out that our entire two-day agenda had no discernible meaning.

After much debate, we realized that we had gotten sucked into a web of business speak and immediately used the two day off-site meeting (except the team-building ropes course) to develop the following list of banned cliches and descriptions within the office:

Thinking outside the box.  

A passive/aggressive phrase meant to insinuate that the listener was stuck in a limited way of thinking, while the speaker had achieved a level of business enlightenment not seen since the dalai lama.  Or Steve Jobs.

Throw under the bus.  

This was a cute phrase 15 years ago, but now it’s just gotten plain silly.  While I’m sure it’s just a lame business cliche, I still feel a need to stay an extra step away from the curb when a Greyhound goes by.

At the end of the day. 

An incredible song from Les Miserables, but when used in a meeting, it just makes people “more miserables”.

“Anything” 2.0.

At one point, calling something 2.0 meant that you were ultra-hip, knew what was next, and were obviously more plugged in than those stuck in the hopelessly outdated 1.0 realm.  Fortunately, we nixed our Blog 2.0 planning meeting just in time.

I’m just sayin’. 

While not confined to the business world, this was meant as a universal way to negate the offensive comment that you just said.  As an example, “Wow Jimmy, those sunglasses are so huge that your nose looks normal-sized.  I’m just sayin’.”  It’s like a more modern version of the old Southern stand-by, “Oh, bless your heart”.

There’s no ‘I’ in Team.  

Seriously?  We’re using spelling now for motivation?  Although there’s no “I” in team, there is a “me”, “am”, “eat” and “meat”.  Not sure if that means anything, but based on spelling, I think the team should go out for a burger.

The customer is always right.

Perhaps, no cliche has created more confusion with 17-year-old supervisors at fast food restaurants. The fact is, customers can be very, very wrong, and automatically siding with abusive or unreasonable customers over employees is never a good idea.  But, we must note, if you find a young manager who actually believes this, you usually can get some free french fries out of the deal.

It is what it is.

This brings redundancy – and repeating yourself by saying the same thing twice – to new levels and plateaus. It’s a more polite way of saying, “I just don’t care about that issue anymore so let’s stop talking about it”.

Get our ducks in a row. 

I’ve tried this. It doesn’t work. They keep walking around.

The elephant in the room.  

Or as an honorable mention, eating the elephant one bite at a time.  Or a zebra doesn’t change its stripes and speaking of the purple cow.  Any way you look at it, I’m pretty sure most business people are day dreaming of being at the zoo when in meetings.

We do note that this list could get exhaustively long, but as a general rule of thumb, we recommend that you never use in conversation any title of a business book more than ten years old or risk a conference room full of eye rolling.