Top 5 Overused Business Cliches

Great post!
In no particular order, mine:
- Get on the same page
- Reinvent the wheel
- Out of the box
- Web 2.0 (I know, it's a bit ironic)
- Proactive

Katy - I love your list. How in the world did I forget "out of the box"??? Possibly worse than synergy!

I am particularly tired of the suggestion that I should "leverage" our synergies. That is like saying we should repeat our redundancies.

Mark - I'm guilty of using the word leverage, but I haven't been leveraging our synergies. :)

How about these gems:

• I wanted to touch base
• "Content Management System"
• Change gears
• Wrestle this bull to the ground

I haven't heard "wrestle the bull", but I'm guilty of saying CMS (not the full name). Does that count as the same?

At the end of the day, I think you hit the nail on the head. Todd, way to go after that low hanging fruit.

For a few months, I was working in the same area as sales people and one phrase which I heard in every conversation with their clients was "touch base". I'd like to tell our clients, "all your base are belong to us", but not many of them have a great sense of humour. :)

How about "I'll pay you in equity" or "as soon as we have funding..." -- not so normal, but they are prevalent. Banks love, "we don't set the rules"...

My new favorite -- "its the economy"

Bill - I think you're speaking startup blasphemy with the first couple and I love the "its the economy" one. We all know it's terrible, but it seems many have found their scapegoat. :)

You have to imagine that boardrooms were quite a bit more effective when men with greased hair smoked cigars and pontificated on ways to kick the shit out of the competition without dancing around the terminology.

But, maybe "circling back with terry and seeing if there is some common ground for us to use as a jump point" is working for someone, somewhere.

Dear Todd,
I appreciate this posting. I work as a fellowships and graduate studies adviser at a liberal arts college, and I read a lot of personal statements and project proposals. Our business and econ students throw these cliches out there at a startling rate, and the problem is especially glaring when they're not applying for business positions.
My two favorites correspond to your top choice, synergy, in so far as they are words whose uses have wandered pretty far from their earlier ones.
Leverage -- I had a student recently write that she had written her senior thesis by "leveraging" the rare book collection at a local library.
Metric -- I'm not sure why measurement or study or whatever other terms apply here have fallen out of favor, but I see many references to metric. And in a lot of cases, it seems that people use it to discuss any sort of analysis or any part of an analysis. Some people also seem to use it to mean result or outcome, which seems even more overdone.