Cadence. My Corporate Buzzword of the Year

Enter into any business or conference setting and you’ll be greeted immediately by the constant murmur of corporate buzzwords. These pithy expressions are embraced in industry settings and beyond, due to their ability to provide an easy shorthand for concepts that we all recognize—with or without an MBA. As with any trend, popularity will rise and fall per quarter, as the descriptions become stale or expand in use to the point of becoming meaningless drivel.

Each year I scribble down what I feel is the “word of the year” to see which ones stick around and become commonplace and which ones expire like avocados. Keeping track of these verbal evolutions as they align with business and socio-behavioral leadership trends has been a fascinating hobby, as well as a great lesson on cultural shifts. Instead of just sharing the list, I've added some commentary.

Here are the most recent additions to my corporate buzzword deck:

2022 - Cadence. Are we synchronizing our stormtrooper mob march or are you just trying to get us to update our Outlook calendar? The latter? You disappoint the Empire. A second line in New Orleans has a cadence. A marching band has a cadence. Weekly meetings and monthly newsletters have frequency, not cadence.

Previous years, starting at the beginning:

2008 - Bandwidth. Once the internet was generally absolved of bandwidth issues through high-speed options, everyone started using it to unironically describe their personal availability. “I’d love to attend your ‘Kittens-N-Mittens’ themed Tupperware Party, Becky, but my bandwidth is completely constrained.” See “pivot” for more social obligation “outs.”

2009 - Pivot. Changing direction due to failure, often blamed on consumer behavior or market conditions. “When everyone started the Keto diet, Domino’s pivoted late in the game to offer salads.” It’s also a polite way to tell people you’re not interested in doing what they’re suggesting. Ten additional corporate karma points are awarded if you add “parking lot” to it (i.e.: “Let’s put this in the parking lot for now and pivot to …”).?

2010 - Deck. Dust off your copy of “Millennial Corporate Slang for Dummies” (soon to be outdated by the Gen Z edition) to check out the hip, new relabeling of “PowerPoint presentation.” You can also get away with PPT. We lowkey stan.

2011 - Cascade. Synonymous with “handing out” or “disseminating.” A middle-management dialect. If you want to rub shoulders with corporate baddies, aka the C-suite crew, be sure to sprinkle in this little phrase to demonstrate your upward mobility potential. “No problem, (Vice President) Stan. I’ll be sure to cascade this down through the ranks.”

2012 - Analytics. Data reporting, but make it goth. She’s a little spooky and getting on her bad side means dishing out more money to avoid digital punishment.

2013 - Deep Dive. The verbal foreshadowing of an unnecessarily long meeting. We suggest amping up carb consumption when this phrase is thrown around, so no innocent interns get forced to order and deliver impossible lunch orders at breakneck speeds.?

2014 - Lean In. Made popular by Cheryl Sandberg who leaned out in 2022. A neat descriptor used to camouflage the ritual sacrifice of work/life balance under the guise of professional empowerment, primarily when it comes to women in the workplace. You CAN have it all, if you work over 60 hours a week and nurse an energy drink addiction.?

2015 - Best Practice. You can infer the existence of “worst practice,” which I am sure we have all personally experienced or witnessed across our years in the workplace. This is usually used to change a process intelligently from “the way we’ve always done it” to “a way that makes sense.” Do you recall the expression, “There is no such thing as ‘on time’. You’re either late or early?” There is no best practice. There is only a right way and a wrong way.

2016 - Ideation. Brainstorming took a cue from Cher and revamped her image. Her new stage name is “Ideation.”

2017 - Blue Ocean. Catapulted into popular knowledge by the business book, everyone started seeking “Blue Ocean” mirages … errm, strategies. Unsubstantiated niche markets have never been hotter.?

2018 - Influencer. Also known as trend adoption advocates. YouTube's golden children emerged from their incubation platform in the early aughts, transitioning into the niche stars of today’s social media universe. Yasss kweens.?

2019 - Alignment. A neutral, therapist-approved way to describe compatibility and ease potential conversational tension. “Our annual budget does not appear to be aligned with the CEO’s proposed strategy to acquire Twitter.” This phrase can also be used to gently break up with an undesirable date.?

2020 - Swimlane. An instant corporate cult classic, especially favored by the Excel spreadsheet denomination and HR representatives. The sheer plethora of unnecessary process flow diagrams and flowchart visuals will send delighted shivers up the spine of any organizational connoisseur.

2021 - Story. The phrase that launched a thousand podcasts and blogs. Did your dog groomer really need to write about their best practices for trimming a Doberman and send it as an erratically-cadenced newsletter? Let’s put that in the parking lot for now.