Put that jargon to good use—play ‘Word Quest’ at your next meeting

Pick an accomplice, identify a few buzz terms, and try to be the first to use it. Bonus points if you get someone else to drop one. Some suggestions are included.

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For Word Quest, you and your accomplice pick one clichéd, meaningless business term—such as managing expectations—and see who can be the first to use that term in a meeting. That person earns the most points. Bonus points are given if you get someone else (not your accomplice) to say the term in the meeting. Of course, you can give extra points for style when someone does a particularly good job working the term into the meeting.

Get started with these terms and sample sentences:

Deliverables

Sorry I’m late. I’ve been actioning my deliverables.

Core competency

Writing is clearly not one of your core competencies.

Manage expectations

The project is already six months behind. Is now a good time to start managing expectations?

Incentivize

How can I incentivize you to proofread your own work?

Ideate

No one is leaving this meeting until we ideate about the new ad campaign.

Reverbiagize

We don’t need to rewrite the entire proposal. Just have Sean reverbiagize it.

Throw under the bus

Watch what you say to Casey in customer support. He would throw his own mother under the bus.

Bandwidth

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