Business Jargon Quotes

The term 'niche' is no longer pejorative.

There are many bad things in this world of ours, but the use of the word 'monetize' has to rank high among them. Also, 'incentivize.' Actually, all the '-ize' words, like 'contextualize' and 'utilize' and 'prioritize.' And - this is almost too horrible to type - 'juniorize.'

I don't find the business easy. The moment you start talking about the business, you start sounding like someone in Spinal Tap.

On ships they call them barnacles; in business they attach themselves to desks and are called vice presidents.

Try as I might, I could not look at an overhead projection of a growth profit matrix and stay conscious.

A good many of the special words of business seem designed more to express the user's dreams than to express a precise meaning.

It took me years to work out the difference between net and gross. In meetings I just used to say, 'Tell me if it's good or bad news.

When people start talking about venture capital and finances and how to create this and do that, a lot of it, I swear, it's like sitting in an escrow meeting when all you want to do is buy a house, and you're signing 50 pieces of paper, but you have no idea what they're talking about.

Corporate types love to pretend their life is exciting. The whispers, fist-pumping and animated hand gestures are all designed to lift our job description from what it really is - that of an overpaid clerk

Everything isn't about synergy.

What do you mean "gangsters"? It's business.

Our business is infested with idiots who try to impress by using pretentious jargon.

I think it's being thrown at the wolves, we call it in our business.

For every one of our failures, we had spreadsheets that looked awesome

Nothing stands for content-free corporate bullshit quite like PowerPoint. And that's just scratching the surface.

If you're talking about how you promoted synergy in an organization, that could mean you just got everybody together for donuts twice a week.

What do you call a co-worker these days? Neither teammate nor confederate will do, and partner is too legalistic. The answer brought from academia to the political world by Henry Kissinger and now bandied in the boardroom is colleague. It has a nice upper-egalitarian feel, related to the good fellowship of collegial.

Of all the depressing abuses of language in business, there is none that gets me so incensed as the rampant overuse of the word 'passionate' in company slogans, marketing blurbs, mission statements and on the sides of vans.

It really gets my back up when people start using business phrases - 'sustainability,' 'the brand,' etc. - about rugby.