Have you ever used buzzwords in the office and felt unsure about the listener’s understanding? Buzzwords are often over-used in the business office. These real buzz words and buzz phrases were gathered while listening carefully in the Detroit area automotive industry.

The calamity in the use of buzzwords is that they lack universal meaning (definition) and are seldom defined when first used. A manager uses them so that he will sound like his director who used them. A supervisor feels obligated to follow the example. Everyone may eventually be saying the same words but with different buzzword definitions. Hence, communication is greatly hampered.

Here is the eighth twenty-five of at least 200 contemporary buzzwords. Each is used in a sentence or followed by descriptive dialogue.

  1. Politically charged – Mentioning transfers makes your entire conversation very politically charged
  2. Prairie dog (in the cube farm) – Our loud laughter prompted our cube farm neighbors to prairie dog (stand up and look over the wall)
  3. Process owners – If it doesn’t work, then the process owners are at fault
  4. Product shake-down – When you drive that car, do a complete product shake-down
  5. Productivity-focused metrics – Productivity-focused metrics measure the key enablers to production efficiency
  6. Promote accountability – Weekly project reviews will promote accountability among the troops
  7. Pucker factor – Any questions not fully answered will create a pucker factor when the director visits
  8. Pull out all the stops – They had to pull out all the stops to win the recognition award
  9. Pull the plug on it – That project is no longer value-added so pull the plug on it
  10. Push the button – Make sure the new budget is all-inclusive before you push the button
  11. Quasi-approval – As long as the boss doesn’t know about it, we have quasi-approval
  12. Quasi-safe – No one has been hurt yet so it’s quasi-safe
  13. R.E.S.P.E.C.T.) – “Common courtesy – it’s not so common anymore.” – Author unknown. So we must have an acronym: Rights and Responsibility, Equality, Standards of Success, Perception, Effort, Communication, Training.
  14. Radar screen – The potential for error was not even on our radar screen
  15. Ramp-up – Ramp-up the intensity until the assembly is complete
  16. Recency of data – The value of your presentation is linked to the recency (freshness) of the data
  17. Report on a dotted line – He works in the neighboring department but reports on a dotted line to our department’s manager
  18. Restructuring – This organization requires restructuring to become effective
  19. Risk factors – Have you listed all the risk factors associated with making the data public?
  20. Roadblocks – What are the roadblocks to getting complete buy-in?
  21. Rocket science (not good) – We don’t want to use rocket science to solve this problem
  22. Role model – Very few employees are rated as a role model because most of us have imperfections in our work ethic
  23. Root Cause Analysis – Perform root cause analysis to find the real culprits
  24. Rosetta stone – The missing report could be the Rosetta stone of their data manipulation secrets
  25. Rosy glasses – Sometimes we become protective and look at our employees through rosy glasses