Prick up your ears each time you hear one of these key business buzzwords. When you hear two, go to high alert. If three are buzzing around a meeting in quick succession, tie your shoelaces tight and get ready to stand up. If all four are spoken at the one event, adopt one or more of these survival techniques:

  1. feign an acute myocardial infarction
  2. burst into tears
  3. fall asleep and start snoring
  4. rush to the bathroom
  5. prepare for your exit interview
  6. avoid eye contact
  7. develop Tourette’s syndrome
  8. press Ctrl+Alt+Del
  9. look busy, or
  10. shout ‘Bingo!’ and go home.

Here are some definitions to help with your decision-making:

Values

  • Something to fall back on when the cashflow doesn’t.

Vision

  • Something that the CEO has at a management retreat, after too much alcohol and caffeine, followed by too little sleep;
  • a perfect response when you don’t understand the detail of a problem: “Is this congruent with out vision?”
  • A management retreat held at a beautiful resort, #2 in the sequence: values, vision, mission … and if there’s more money in the kitty and the end of the financial year – strategy.
  • Proof that contemporary management theory is the new religion.

Mission

Nobody actually knows what this means, so just nod wisely when it comes up as a thing to have, to do, and to believe in. Passionate statements help. Here are a few to get you started:

  • “I’m totally on board with the commitment to our mission being critical; it’s mission-critical”
  • “My position is that I’m a missionary for our mission”, or
  • “Our mission statement tells it like it will be”.

Strategy

  • The scaffolding of the roadmap of the blueprint of the game plan of the infrastructure of the architecture of what we’re doing next week.

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