Heading back to work? Here's a guide to water cooler jargon to help you ease back in. Photo / Getty
Heading back to work? Here's a guide to water cooler jargon to help you ease back in. Photo / Getty
Ok-Nomics, the silver tsunami, co-operative conversions, resilience and the wellbeing shmooze. Once, we just went to work, but in the past two years, EVERYTHING has changed. Ruth Spencer takes a light-hearted look at top workplace buzzwords over the decades and wonders what words we’ll be using a decade from now.
10,000 BCE: The Grind
The Grind: Working relentlessly towards a goal for long hours with no immediate reward.
Life for your typical Paleolithic entrepreneur was all about the Grind, except they called it the Grunt because language development wasn’t on the agenda until the next financial quarter, which wouldn’t be invented for several thousand years.
The Grind is office lingo for literally grinding bits of rock with other rocks. These days we try not to reinvent the wheel, but your average Paleolithic worker had “invent wheel” on their KPIs - they walked so we could drive.
Forget Hunting and Gathering, you had to Hustle and Grunt if you wanted the corner cave and the fanciest wheel in the wheelpark.
4000 BCE: Low-Hanging Fruit
Low-Hanging Fruit: The most easily achieved set of tasks or goals
According to the best-selling management handbook of all time, the Bible, office life in 4000 BCE was paradise. Every day was casual Friday. There was free fruit everywhere. The gender balance at the top tier was perfect, although there wasn’t much diversity.
But every industry needs a disruptor, and the notorious LuciferCorp sought to displace the existing market leader by pointing out the temptations of Low-Hanging Fruit.
According to the Bible, office life in 4000 BCE was paradise. But every industry needs a disruptor, and the notorious LuciferCorp sought to point out the temptations of Low-Hanging Fruit. Photo / 123rf
Distracting the management team with snackable content led to the complete downfall of Eden Inc, leading to several major dismissals. No gardening leave was offered.
The disgraced executives began their own Startup known as HumanRace.org, which despite patchy performance has since come to dominate the business landscape.
Unfortunately, the enterprise is at constant risk from the Peter Principle, in which everyone rises to the level of their incompetence and then writes a book about it.
1400-1800 AD: Wheelhouse
Wheelhouse: area of interest or expertise
Every executive works best within their wheelhouse. In the colonial era those searching for new markets, or keen on a hostile takeover of an established one, needed to be comfortable in an actual ship’s wheelhouse.
Their hands were on the helm, steering towards new horizons - once they’d been suitably onboarded, that is.
When they said they were mounting an aggressive campaign, they weren’t kidding. Whether brand-saturating with their traditional logos and best practice or relaunching under a skull and crossbones, these pirate capitalists went out and asset-stripped, sorry, civilised, every market they could find.
The 1800s: Blue-Sky Thinking
Blue-Sky Thinking: Brainstorming without limits
The Industrial Revolution gave us a surge of new ideas so overwhelming that in 1899, Commissioner of the US Patent Office Charles Duell said nothing more could be invented. He was wrong.
What could be exploited for fun and profit? The Blue-Sky Thinking of the Industrial Revolution led to supply chain issues for actual blue sky. Photo / Getty Images
Everyone was Blue-Sky Thinking: what else could be exploited, what can we dig up, burn down, stripmine or simply rub vigorously with coal dust for fun and profit?
The result was incredible technological advancement in a very short time. There were concurrent supply chain issues for actual blue sky, but what price progress?
1950s: Pushing the Envelope
Push the Envelope: approach or extend the limits of what is possible
Not stationery based. Pushing the envelope comes from aeronautics, the envelope being the boundaries of what is physically safe.
The 50s were all about the dawning space age, and how we’d all be driving flying cars and wearing silver unitards very, very soon.
Of course, when they said “all”, they were referring to white men, and sometimes women if they looked nice in a silver unitard. Diversity? Now that really would be pushing it.
1980s: Elevator Pitch
Elevator Pitch: to effectively express your big idea in 30 seconds or less.
Impossible to think of the 80s corporate world without the Yuppie, the Young Urban Professional.
Eager and determined to pitch their big concept to any executive foolish enough to be caught in the elevator with them. It must have been a thing of dread for any powerful scion to pop down to the lobby, what with passionate Gordon Gecko wannabes lurking behind every potted ficus.
Elevator pitch is a metaphor these days, thankfully. Back when it was literal, skyscraper elevator pitches could go on long enough to get awkward. Photo / Getty Images
Some of those skyscrapers are pretty high, so an elevator pitch could go on long enough to get awkward, except that elevator pitches are always awkward.
These days it’s a metaphor, so wrap it up quick.
1990s: Vuca
Vuca: an acronym for Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity and Ambiguity
The 90s is when both Skynet and business jargon became self-aware. The acronym Vuca took hold of business conversation.
Once you’d explained it wasn’t anything to do with foot warts, you could use it to efficiently describe the chaos of the current business environment or just to explain why the coffee machine wasn’t working today.
To mitigateVuca you needed to turn your ‘unknown unknowns’ to ‘known unknowns’, be Agile by deploying an Ooda (observe–orient–decide–act) Loop and then leave the company to raise goats in Peru.
In our exciting modern times, thanks to *gestures vaguely* all this, Vucahas been replaced with Bani: Brittle, Anxious, Nonlinear and Incomprehensible, which is not a very good Tinder bio.
2000s: Rightsizing
Rightsizing: convert to an appropriate or premium size
Why do they call it a recession when it’s always looming? At the risk of being redundant, the Oughts were all about scaling back. Downsizing, efficiency, streamlining: the perks gathered in the heady 90s started to fall away. No more helicopters to the Christmas Party; an end to the three-hour strip club lunch.
Nobly and bravely, the C-Suite started looking at which minimum-wage dogsbodies out in the open-plan seats could be safely let go. “Last in, first out!” they cried, safe in the knowledge this wasn’t them.
While ashen-faced millennials traipsed out in droves toward a barren job market, management gently woke the CFO to see if they’d saved enough to still get bonuses. And they had!
2010s: ESG Strategies
ESG: Environmental, Social and Governance - non-financial analytics to identify risks and growth opportunities.
It’s taken a dozen millennia to get from Grind to Governance: for businesses to realise that environmental and social factors might be worth factoring into the running of companies. Because executives are basically altruistic and good!
Well, no. Because somehow, not being wantonly exploitative of people and resources turned out to be good for the bottom line.
Sustainability practices save money and protect product supply; addressing gender pay gaps and workplace diversity helps retain talent.
Not committing human rights abuses in the supply chain just makes everyone feel a little bit less horrified on a daily basis. A win-win.
#QuitTok: making a TikTok about quitting your job.
TikTok has become a common room to discuss the common affliction: bad jobs.
Give notice, get noticed.
QuitTok and Quiet Quitting means to give notice to get noticed. Photo / 123rf
We’re still living through the Great Resignation; there’s nothing like widespread apocalyptic dread to make someone wonder if they really want to keep working on this spreadsheet until the world ends or if they’d rather start that cottagecore Etsy store they’ve been dreaming of. At least they’d die with their crochet boots on.
See also: Quiet Quitting, where you keep your job but only to run your Etsy business from your work email.
The Future: Boil The Ocean
Boil the Ocean: To make a project or task unnecessarily difficult.
Boil the ocean – so unnecessary, so laughably impossible. But also how slightly uncomfortable in a future that’s getting noticeably warm.
You also know that the first person to hear that phrase immediately wondered if you could tin pre-boiled fish for profit.
Other business jargon such as Greenfielding (a project that lacks constraints from prior work) will also start to feel a bit nostalgic when Generation Z++ asks what a green field is.
In a world of content farms, we’ve never been less content, or further from the farm.
“Boil the Ocean” is the new “reinvent the wheel”, but if Paleolithic creatives hadn’t invented the wheel all those years ago the oceans wouldn’t be heating up right now. We’ve come full circle.
