Australian business-speak

It looks like business-speak isn't limited to the US and the UK: Roz has written in with some examples heard during a one-hour 'Dialogue Day' session at the Australian Taxation Office. Here they are, with Roz's comments in brackets.

  • Key drivers
  • Key deliverables
  • Key strategies (why can't they use some synonyms for 'key'?)
  • ...sessions around delivery plans (whatever happened to 'about' or 'regarding' or 'concerning'?)
  • At the end of the day
  • Cascade down corporate messages (well, cascades don't often go up do they?)
  • Efficiencies made to business (how do you 'make' an efficiency?)
  • Big ticket item
  • Co-design session
  • Impacting on all the messages out there
  • Hip pocket
  • Value-adding
  • A deliberate service model (what – as opposed to an accidental one?)
  • Sophisticated profiling and risk
  • Level playing field
  • The tax agent community (yeah, there's probably an axe-murdering community too. Everything has a community these days)
  • Principles-based
  • Penalty 'safe-harbour'
  • Grass-roots issues
  • Base tenants (I think the $120,000-per-year idiot meant tenets)
  • Capability-building projects

Thanks for those, Roz. 'Level playing field' is one that often appears in our publication; we hear all sorts of gubbins about 'communities'; and 'impacting' is one of my personal bugbears. So I feel your pain...

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Is 'At the end of the day' business speak? I just thought it was a saying.

Brandon Dilbeck said...

"Grass-roots issues"?? I have no idea what that is supposed to mean. The ideas are tiny and plentiful, like the roots of a lawn of grass?

JD (The Engine Room) said...

'At the end of the day' - not business speak as such, but a cliche that is found in business a lot. As well as sporting commentary I believe...

And 'grass-roots issues'. Well, I know that political parties talk about their normal members as their grass roots (as opposed to the party's leadership).

I'm not quite sure how this phrase would be used outside a political context though...

Anonymous said...

Job advertisements/descriptions for the media, IT, and marketing industries are a great source of business-speak hilarity. Or at least they are in Australia. Some of them make so little sense and have so little substance that I have to call the respective HR department bosses to try and find out what the hell they are talking about in order to figure out if I am eligible to apply. Which usually amuses them no end... not :)