Jargon gone bad: 15 words you need to stop using now

Feel free to “touch base,” “reach out,” “shift the paradigm” or start “drinking the Kool-Aid.” Just don’t tell everyone you’re doing it.

And if you must “leverage” yourself by “following best practices” and “giving 100%,” by all means keep it to yourself.

Why? Customers and colleagues are sick of hearing all these cliches. They’re so overused, that they carry little or no meaning in conversations these days, according to unscientific research done by Forbes.

In fact, if you want to knock out all annoying business jargon – and talk clearly about what needs to be discussed – you can use Forbes’ March Madness-like bracket to eliminate phrases day-by-day.

For now, drop these phrases – the 15 most annoying and useless in any business setting:

1. Core competency
2. Buy-in
3. S.W.A.T. team
4. Swim lane
5. Empower
6. Drinking the Kool-Aid
7. Move the needle
8. Open the kimono
9. Bleeding edge
10. Tiger teams
11. Burning platform
12. Lots of moving parts
13. Corporate values
14. Make hay
15. Scalable