Stop telling your co-workers to ‘think outside the box’

New York Post ^ | April 25, 2018 | SWNS

[sparklite2]

Top 40 most cringe-worthy phrases used at the office

1. Give 110 percent
2. Think outside the box
3. Hammer it out
4. Heavy lifting
5. Throw them under the bus
6. Don’t count your chickens before they’ve hatched
7. Pushing the envelope
8. Let the cat out of the bag
9. Let’s circle back
10. Win-win situation
11. Blue-sky thinking
12. Boil the ocean
13. Synergy
14. Low-hanging fruit
15. Take it to the next level
16. Barking up the wrong tree
17. Going forward
18. Let’s ballpark this
19. Run this up the flagpole
20. Back to square one
21. There’s no I in team
22. Back to the drawing board
23. Paradigm shift
24. Elephant in the room
25. Raise the bar
26. Drill down
27. Best thing since sliced bread
28. Deep dive
29. Skin in the game
30. Reach out
31. Touch base
32. Play hardball
33. Don’t reinvent the wheel
34. Kept in the loop
35. The bottom line
36. Down the road
37. I’ll loop you in
38. Hit the nail on the head
39. ASAP
40. Team player

[sparklite2]

I imagine it refers to the red and blue pills used in the movie ‘Matrix.’

[sparklite2]

I hate the ones that imply a caring link verging on intimacy between entities, such as ‘reach out’ and ‘share.’ This cynicism may the function of having once had a military mind.

[sparklite2]

Heh. That’s the same dog-ate-my-homework vacuity as ‘with God all things are possible’ is to theology.

[ntnychik]

Great thread!
Lean in.
Facilitate the meeting of stakeholders.

[gundog]

A is A. An Ayn Rand idiom.

[trebb]

When the military started enacting a policy to allow us to think outside the box and find better ways to do things, they put us in boxes with the "approved' functions to look at with rules about how we should go about it.

I had made a personalized tracking sheet for the shop I headed and some folks liked it so they decided to use it as an item to adapt for all the various shops - the officers in charge ignored that it was so effective (single sheet of paper in front of folks' training records) because it was tailored to my shop and came up with a 23 page version for "standardization"....

[WayneS]

Right! And it also annoys me when someone is reported to be “speaking out” on some mundane subject.

[John Milner]

No, but I changed jobs pretty soon afterwards. He didn’t have the nads to do it anyway. And I knew that.

He and one of the other department heads shared a brain. Always working to put the rest of the departments down so they could shine.

I’m 8 years retired. So glad I don’t hear the catch phrases and mandatory HR BS that just seemed to get worse every year.

[alternatives?]

I am close to retirement. The last 8 years have really seen an acceleration in catch phrases and mandatory HR BS, Diversity, respect, agile, global standard, improving journey, new way, collaboration.

Add in offices spaces like a Nike factory and flat compensation and declining benefits.

[T-Bone Texan]

I learned the term “you can’t unbake a cake” from D. Rumsfeld. I use it on my kids!

Least favorite phrase: a “granular view”, meaning to look at something closely.

[Responsibility2nd]

In my work, I deal with late loan payments. When a customer asks me how to remove a 30 day delinquency from their credit reports, I tell them that you can’t unring the bell. What’s done is done. They were late and it’s been reported.

If they persist in getting it removed, I have also been known to tell them to invent a way-back machine. Then go back in time - pay the payment before the 30 days - and “problem solved”.

[TexasTransplant]

*** “I see my favorite old cliché is not listed. “You can’t unring the bell” ***

PBS Cartoons have a song “You can’t untoast the toast”

The Ring of the Bell lives on!