Buzzwords

Almost every industry has its own buzzwords. You’ll see them in corporate mission statements and hear them at conferences and lectures. “Big business” companies in particular seem to love them. But what are buzzwords? Why do we use them? When, if ever, is it important to be familiar with them? These are questions I ask myself every now and then, and I find that the answers are usually more consistent than most people may think.

Buzz-What?

A little research shows that Wikipedia provides some insight:

A buzzword (also known as a fashion word or vogue word) is a vague idiom, or a neologism, that is commonly used in managerial, technical, administrative, and sometimes political environments. Although buzzwords can impress one’s audience with the pretense of knowledge, they typically make sentences difficult to dispute, on account of their cloudy meaning.

For those of you with a penchant for trusting older, established sources of research:

“an important-sounding usually technical word or phrase often of little meaning used chiefly to impress laymen”

So a buzzword by definition obfuscates unclear ideas. Arcane business concepts that have little or no value usually end up turning into buzzwords that are spewed out by industry pundits and players alike.

This leaves us to our next question: why use buzzwords?

Communication failure

I’m of the opinion that most of the time, buzzwords are used as a communications crutch. Clearly, one of the more popular uses of buzzwords may be used to change the tone of voice (or text) to a more “professional” one. In doing so, however, the speaker/writer may be demonstrating a certain “overprofessionalism” which may be an indicator that they don’t exactly know what they’re talking about.

Consider the following (pseudo) example:

Hi Aashay,
I just wanted to touch base with you about the new features on the Gibson. The client is beginning to see the value-add of leveraging our on-demand solutions and I would like you to prepare a few deliverables to pass to the stakeholders. Moving forward, we will want to provide synergistic metrics that demonstrate increased ROI.
Ping me if you have any questions.
-Bob

To a lay person, there isn’t much substance behind the email. However, to the experienced yuppie who is conditioned to parse buzzwords into english, the message indicates that someone is asking me to perform some action and/or interact with a client. Removing the corporatey buzzwords, this email becomes far less intimidating, and perhaps the message becomes even more clear:

Hi Aashay,
I just explained the new features of the Gibson to the clients and they like what they saw. Can you provide us with some detailed documents I can give to some of their executives? In particular, we’re going to want to show them that working with us and our products was well-worth their time and money.
Contact me if you have any questions.
-Bob

I’m not sure why they do it, but management executives in particular are very good at using buzzwords, especially when trying to communicate an ideas or concepts without knowledge of details. I’m of the opinion that a humble “I don’t know, but I intend to find out” beats a long-winded circular response any day.

Just for fun, here’s a small list of some other buzzwords I’ve seen or heard that bug me:

• leverage: This one’s used in place of the word “use” more often than it needs to be. Say this one enough and it’ll start to annoy you.
• net new: I heard this one from a friend of mine at a different consulting company. Example usage: “We’re only performing upgrades on anything that is net new.” This one is particularly awful. what’s with the “net”? Is there such thing as “gross” new? Isn’t simply “new” adequate?
• value-add: An ubiquitous phrase, although what’s with the “add” part. A common use phrase would be something like “where’s the value-add in this new feature?” My question is, does the “add” really add any value?
• deliverable: A generic word that came from consulting practices to describe anything you give to a client: documents, software code, etc. Say it ten times fast.
• synergize: This is pretty much the stereotypical business buzzword. Wikipedia describes synergy as “The phenomenon in which two or more discrete influences or agents acting together create an effect greater than that predicted by knowing only the separate effects of the individual agents” …What?

Good for nothin? Not quite.

The abundance of buzzwords may lead one to believe that there has to be some value in at least some of them…somewhere? I don’t disagree that certain buzzwords have importance. However in my opinion, they only become useful when everyone agrees to their meaning. Certain buzzwords have permeated throughout different industries and become ubiquitous (such as “value-add”, or “low-hanging fruit”). Perhaps it would only be fair to remove these words and phrases from the “buzzword” category and place them gently in the “jargon” category?

Besides playing Buzzword Bingo and sugarcoating unfamiliar concepts, there is one example that I can think of where a few buzzwords (used in moderation, of course), can be quite useful: Job interviews. Studying up in advance and dropping an industry buzzword here and there during a job interview can show that you’ve done your research and made an attempt to prepare for the interview. In fact, it might even be fair to say that interviewers will expect at least a few to be thrown about; the interviewers themselves tend to use them (this is especially true in the consulting field). Pro tip for consulting interviews: ask your interviewers what their companies’ typical deliverables are. This will give you a general idea of what it is they actually do.

Be warned however, as this can also lead to a major pitfall if you use too many or are careless in using them. If you’re going to use a buzzword be absolutely sure you understand when and where it is used, and make sure you’re using it in the right context. For example, during one of my first job interviews, I mentioned something about “human-centric design” (at the time this was a buzzword to me. I now know that the phrase holds true meaning, but that’s a story for later) to one of my interviewers. He responded with an enthusiastic story about how he studied Human-Computer Interaction in college and had a variety of interests in the field, and started to ask me technical questions that I clearly could not answer. It was a pretty embarrassing moment.

Scalable Conclusive Logistical Objective Framework Smorgasbord

The inevitable mumbo jumbo can confuse, bore, and even belittle unprepared newcomers to the corporate world. While it’s a bunch of fluff for the most part, there are occastions, however, where it comes in handy. The key to buzzwords is using them in moderation. Too many can make you sound like you have no idea what you’re talking about, but too few may indicate that you’re not really trying. In my opinion, if you’re ever unsure about the vocabulary to use, keeping it simple usually doesn’t hurt. Just make sure you know what you’re talking about, and if you don’t, simply tell the truth. People will respect you a lot more for admitting when you don’t know something than trying to “buzz” your way around it.

Know any buzzwords you find annoying or interesting? Leave some in the comments!

Thanks again to Matt Moen and Ryan Spraetz for reading drafts of this.