Welcome to the Zoo of Corporate Failure, and our tour through the graveyard of corporate culture.
Our first stop: the Buzzword Baboon.
You will spot him instantly. He is the one turning a simple “How’s the project going?” into a 10-minute dissertation on “operationalising our thought leadership pipeline”.
He doesn’t answer questions, he “reframes paradigms”. He doesn’t solve problems, he “architects holistic solutions for exponential stakeholder alignment”.
The Buzzword Baboon has mastered the dark art of saying absolutely nothing with maximum confidence. If you ask for a deadline he will pivot to “discovery phase optimisation“. Push for specifics and you’re “getting too tactical“, we need to “ideate in the strategic headspace” first.
His natural habitat is any meeting where actual decisions might accidentally happen. Armed with a whiteboard and an endless supply of buzzwords, he transforms productive conversations into linguistic quicksand.
And most people just nod along. Nobody wants to be the person admitting they don’t understand what “evangelising holistic transformation” means. Especially when it looks like everyone else knows.
So the baboon keeps chattering, the room keeps nodding, and everyone leaves feeling like something important happened. They just can’t remember what.
Greatest hits:
🖱️ “Let’s double-click on that offline”
🧠 “We’re architecting a paradigm shift in how we think about thinking”
📈 “This initiative unlocks exponential stakeholder alignment”
💡 “We need to operationalise our ideation pipeline”
💥 “We’re co-creating scalable impact through frictionless innovation”
This post is part of the Zoo of Corporate Failure series, which aims to highlight what happens when company culture fails. More background here.
