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At the End of the Day, Are You Tired of Thinking Outside of the Box?

posted May 8, 2009 - 1:15pm
At the End of the Day, Are You Tired of Thinking Outside of the Box?

I don't know about you, but I get fed up listening to all the corporate buzz-words that are constantly thrown around in meetings and sent through e-mail. You know those words used that have no real meaning, they are just filler, like when "the rubber hits the road" or how about such "value-added" phrases like, touch base, paradigm shift, cross-functional, customer driven, helicopter view, and win-win. After working in corporate culture for awhile you will struggle and find yourself one day accidentally talking about "synergies," being "on the ground," or how you are working with "best-of-breed" products. If you are sure the buzzwords are spilling over into your writing, there is a free application called Bullfighter 1.2 that was written by Deloitte that is available from http://fightthebull.com/bullfighter.asp

This valuable tool will integrate into Word, Outlook, and Powerpoint and allow you to rate the bull factor of your writing, and will give corrections for useless corporate phrases. You can de-bull your documents. So at the end of the day, you will have a cleaner document without leveraging all the corporate bells and whistles. It will be easier to read, a win-win for everyone. :)

http://fightthebull.com/index.asp



Comments

Very funny! Many years ago I

Very funny! Many years ago I did a few jobs as a translator. The problem with translating is that you have to read every word and, as I recall, some of the marketing brochures made absolutely no sense whatsoever! Pure verbal background-music. I just hope I didn't infect another language with the same bull!! Join Xomba Here

RE: Is there a place for cliches?

No not cringing. Those are not used so commonly so as to offend the senses. The one that drives me nuts, and the reason I wrote the article is the phrase "at the end of the day." I hear it so much, in so many different places. It is like the buddy who uses the "F" word for a noun, adjective, adverb, etc... in every sentence. It just drives you nuts to hear anything repeated over and over again.

Rpurbeck Xombytes

Is there a place for cliches?

I enjoyed your article. "Tongue in cheek" I'd say. More often than not, I'd agree wholeheartedly that there is no place for boardroom point scoring with meaningless phrases. However, I did win a few points with "knowledge is power" "a raft of" "you catch more bees with honey than you do with vinegar" and so on years ago. I won't bore you. No doubt you are "cringing already." Alethea

alethea000's Xombyte

The Bull Index

Of course I checked, The bull index for the xombyte was only a meager 6.8 out of 10 on the bull index. I could have done better by using 'global' or "let's take this offline" according to the comments for my document. :)

Rpurbeck Xombytes

Basically, it takes two to tango, if you know what I mean

Have you had this article evaluated? It is well written but uses a good proportion of the cliches (necessarily). Its score would be interesting.

AndAnotherThing2 writes COMEDYand is Xomba's first featured HISTORIAN

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