When the American composer John Cage said “I have nothing to say, and I’m saying it,” he was being at once poetic and tantalisingly paradoxical.

Too often today we are surrounded in our workplaces by people who also have nothing to say, and are saying it – without it ever dawning on them that nobody has a clue what they are talking about. They are not being poetic or paradoxical. They are being impenetrable and obscure. They are practitioners of business bullshit.
These men and women, tycoons and trainees, are the workplace wonks who speak in phrases that seem to be assembled from a random string of Dadaist inventions. They talk about boiling the ocean and backing up the truck without ever grasping that the blank-eyed look on their colleagues’ faces masks concern, not wonderment.
What does it all mean? Here’s our best guess at some answers:

Verbs
To action To do
To circle back To go over everything again with a slightly different group of people; to procrastinate
To get the fish out on the table To talk about the awkward stuff no one wants to face
To take to the next level To speculate wildly (see also “innovation”)
To socialise with the team To send your work to everyone in the company so they can see what a genius you are; to go to Nando’s
To boil the ocean To waste time on a pointlessly ambitious task
To cascade down To send an email to #everyone
To move the needle To make an actual difference. Rare
To punch a puppy To do something hateful for the good of the firm
To get buy-in To brainwash
To drill down To nitpick
To drink from the firehose To be overwhelmed and therefore useless
To drink the Kool-Aid To show blind, Pavlovian allegiance
To empower To transfer accountability, to wriggle off the hook
To smash it To complete an unremarkable task on time
To brainstorm To shout at a flip chart
To ping To irritate by email or text
To grow the cake To turn the volume up to 11

Nouns
Innovation Looks impressive but doesn’t really work
Transformation programme Expensive, disruptive way to maintain the status quo
Change agent Troublemaker
Deep dive When you drill down and never come up
Blue sky thinking Ostensibly fun but ultimately futile idea generation
Cakeism The belief that you can have all the benefits of something with none of the disadvantages (see also “Brexit”)
Off-site Meeting held outside the office (see “to brainstorm”). The snacks are better but the ideas are worse and someone always breaks a limb team-building

Learnings Regrets
Low-hanging fruit Easy tasks usually based on googling
Feedback Criticism
Wash up Meeting to agree the formal list of regrets (see “learnings”)
KPI (key performance indicator). Ransom
Full court press Panicky bullying of junior workers close to deadline, with added half-understood sports metaphor
Onboarding Like welcoming, only without the humanity and warmth
Stakeholder Axe wielder
Swim lane A straitjacket of responsibilities
Takeaway Sadly, nothing to do with curry
Thought leader Fantasist
Pitch rolling Forewarning of management U-turn (see also “heads up”)

Phraseology
Do you have a sec? Do you have an hour?
Going forward From now on until I change it
Bleeding edge Sometimes “cutting edge” is not quite Stephen King enough
Run it up the flagpole I dare you to suggest it
Put on a record and see who dances Ditto
Move fast and break things Leave others to pick up the pieces
Thanks for reaching out Oh God, how did you track me down?
Take this offline Stop talking like you’re an idiot
Touch base Contact, but NB never use this phrase
Open the kimono Reveal information, but ditto
Zero base it Cut costs to the bone (normally accompanied by an increase in revenue target)
It is what it is Kierkegaard? Sartre? No, it’s the acceptance of failure by someone who can’t be bothered to fix a problem
Park that Ignore it

Are we aligned? Has everyone stopped squabbling?
Laying hens Productive, valued employees
Back the truck up Are you mad? Or: say all that again, I was asleep
We’re still in beta Don’t blame us if it’s broken
Take it to the next level Meaningless, unless said by someone who realises as the lift door opens that they pressed 18 instead of 19
Idea shower Not to be confused with shit shower (see also “brainstorm”)
By close of play today Oh all right, by tomorrow morning
Opening image: Wonks’ way in The IT Crowd
Further reading
George Orwell’s Politics and the English Language sounded the alarm in 1946 about a rising tide of jargon, even if it didn’t stop it
Harry Frankfurt’s On Bullshit (2005) spent 27 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list, even though it was first published as an essay 19 years earlier