netjeff.com Humor collection Consultant-ease

This is a list of annoying language that was collected on a 7 month consulting 
project in Florida.  They levied a fine of $.25 on anyone who used one of these 
terms.  After seven months, they had close to $70 bucks.  They asked that this 
be fowarded around the world (or at least throughout the big consulting firms 
who have been responsible for creating this ridiculous vernacular).  Help save 
the English language from irreparable damage. 

- Add Value, Value Added, Value Add, Addition of Value, Value Additive, Evaluating 
  the Value Add.  (We need a fresh credo)
- Subject Matter Expert (SME)  ("We need to get an Excel SME to teach us how to 
  sum a column of numbers.") 
- Up to speed (In reference  to knowledge)
- Metrics
- Stake in the Ground  (Are we a surveying company?) 
- Raise a Red Flag
- Robust  (This adjective was traditionally used for things like cigars, now we 
  use it to describe software and strategy) 
- Slice and Dice (In reference to data.  Are we making fruit salad or databases)
- Piggy Back  (...off an idea.  A kids game turned management consultant strategy)
- Laundry List   
- Soup to Nuts 
- Craft a Message (I have heard very few well crafted messages, especially full 
  of this language)
- Wordsmith (Again, strong language compared to what is actually written or said)
- Make that Happen 
- Back Pocket  (...idea.  Now, in addition to a wallet, Consultants keep ideas 
  and strategies in their back pocket)
- People, Values, Culture (PVC)  (referred to as a civil right .  e.g., Making 
  fun of one's religion of is a PVC violation)
- Sidebar   
- Offline  (When any truth or candid conversation is about to be spoken in a 
  meeting, someone always asks to take it offline) 
- Head's up  (Why are people always giving me a "head's up" about this or 
  that?  My head is typically up during waking hours)
- Touch and Go  (Isn't this a military exercise?) 
- Touch Base  (e.g.,  "I will touch base with you next week."   That sounds 
  like sexual harassment to me.)  
- Low Hanging Fruit  (need I say more?) 
- Deliverable   (Probably the most widely used and annoying of Consultant-ease.) 
- Issue/Resolution  (I hear people refer to getting their car fixed on the 
  weekend as 'resolving an issue')
- Per  (...your request) 
- Ducks in a Row 
- Radar Screen  (I know the PDA phenomena is really taking off, but I don't 
  know anyone who actually has a radar screen on them) 
- Living Document  (sometimes referred to a breathing also.   hmmm.) 
- Caveat  (A very specific legal term now used by consultants to put 
  disclaimers on everything they say) 
- In Sync  (Are we consutants or members of an Olympic swimming event?) 
- Key (I read an article on the Knowledge Exchange that used the adjective 
  'key' no less than 20 times in 6 paragraphs.)
- Bubble up (when analysts finally get their collective voices heard by the 
  Partners)
- Trickle down (opposite of bubble up, except this happens much more quickly) 
- Log (as a verb... not in the timber industry)
- Showstopper  (An event which may kill a project instantaneously... like 
  analysts passing hate mail about clients on the client's email server)
- Single/Multi-thread  (denoting one or many people working on something)
- Multitasking  (I hate this) 
- Paradigm (Mix one part Covey to 100 parts original thought, not the other way 
- around) 
- Dovetail  (Norm Abrams uses these joints on the New Yankee Workshop.  
  Consultants use these to interface platforms)   
- Continuum  (I think Shaheen coined this in the 1995 annual review, it took 
  off from there.) 
- On the same page 
- Voice-mail (as a verb.  We like to verb words)
- Notes  (as a verb)
- Roll anything (off, on, out, up.  Consultants are always rolling)
- Fire off  (a dramatic way to send and email) 
- Readiness (Someone told me one time that they were assessing my promotion 
  'readiness.'  I thought it sounded funny) 
- Pound (#) out (of a voicemail)
- To Punt  (Part of the sports analogy craze)   
- Ball in/out of court  (more sports analogies) 
- Drop the Ball 
- Take a S.W.A.G. (Super Wild Ass Guess) 
- Lay of the Land  (I heard a manager say that he spent the first week at the 
  client assessing the 'lay of the land'.   Again are we a surveying firm?)
- Topology  (in reference to a Local Area Network) 
- Hammer Away  (We all secretly want to be carpenters.)
- Gray Area (Everything is a grey area when you don't know what you are talking 
  about) 
- Raise/Lower the Bar 
- Guru  (It is amazing how little real experience it takes to become a guru at 
  something.  Same goes for SME) 
- Process (way overused)
- Due Diligence  (I heard a guy argue that he had performed 'due diligence' in 
  helping with the housework) 
- Driving  (in reference to using a PC, or a process.  Ever have someone walk 
  up to your PC and ask if they can drive?)
- Walk the Path (in reference to navigating in an application)
- Gameplan   
- Doing anything "in or out of the box"  (I wonder if the person who created 
  this analogy envisioned an entire industry building up around it?)  
- Data Mining  (Are we consultants or spelunkers?) 
- Drill Down (Are we consultants or roughnecks?)
- Mapping (Are we consultants or cartographers?)
- Checkpoint  
- Granularity  (We do a sieve analysis on our ideas) 
- Regarding (this or that, constantly) 
- Tagging  (as in returning/making calls)
- Synergy  (Back to the Covey recipe) 
- Thumbnail (as in estimating)
- Strawman  (I have yet to understand how building a strawman is analogous to 
  putting together preliminary ideas) 
- Flesh Out  (...ideas) 
- Latest and Greatest 
- Screen Pop 
- Matrix  (Every idea in the world is not two dimensional, therefore everything 
  cannot fit into a matrix) 
- Bottleneck
- Critical Path  (I saw a group of people trying to determine the 'critical 
  path' for performing a pub crawl after work!) 
- Critical Mass (Physics, not people)
- Proactive  (Covey lives!) 
- On Board  (used when a new person is welcomed to the project)
- Ramp up/down 
- Strategic vs. Tactical 
- Level ( High, Low, Lower, Higher, Mid)
- Take a step back 
- 'x' Thousand foot view  ("Lets take a 50,000 foot view of the situation, then 
  we'll dive down to 10,000 feet  and take another look.")
- In terms off. 
- Going forward 
- In the Near/Long term 
- Cross Pollinating (Bees do it on flowers, why can't we do it with ideas?)   
- Framework 
- Painting Broad Strokes (In other words, we had a large effect on the 
  organization) 
- In the Loop  (widely used and highly annoying)
- Percolate  (similar to 'bubble up')
- Silos  (Change management folks love the organizational 'silo' analogy)

netjeff.com Humor collection Consultant-ease