Conventional wisdom can’t make an unprofitable earnings statement disappear, or turn a falling stock into a rising one. But there’s one easy way to flip those frowns upside-down: Pair that bad news with upbeat terms and turn a …
You can’t call layoffs downsizing anymore, and offshoring sounds just as bad to workers as “shipping your jobs to Asia.” What to do? Come up with better buzzwords, of course. And who could object to something so “right” as righ…
Once a clearly defined term that meant “to use force to compel or control a physical thing,” drive has become one of the most insidious and overused buzzwords in the business lexicon. What’s being driven now is often intangib…
Canines seem to bring out the business sector’s creativity, when it comes to the appropriate descriptive phrase. From the “Dogs of the Dow” to “eat your own dog food” to any business snafu derided as a “dog’s dinner,” U.S. fina…
Forget political correctness. Business jargon is one of the last bastions of old-fashioned, rough and tumble crudity. Little surprise, then, that boardroom buzzwords sometimes veer into racism, sexism or — in the case of “open…