How to Unsuck Corporate Jargon


Somewhere, a grammarian cries whenever an office email contains jargon like “upskill” or “calendarize.” Fortunately, Mule Design Studio‘s Unsuck-It.com transforms business twaddle into sparse Hemingway prose—or at least English. Here, for example, is a soul-crushing bizspeak sentence translated into something E.B. White might recognize:

“We can’t boil the ocean, so let’s start by bucketizing the deliverables and picking the low-hanging fruit.”

Unsucked: “We can’t waste time, so let’s prioritize what we can easily accomplish.”

More corporate argot defanged for your amusement and dismay:

Bubble up: Tell someone with more authority.

Bucketize: Sort into categories.

Deep dive: Focus on or explore details.

EOD: End of the workday.

Foils: Slides.

Long pole in the tent: The most difficult task. The hard part, ahem.

Net-net: In summary.

Open the kimono: Share information. Reveal.

Solutioneering: Thinking.

Mule Design, in addition to doing kickass work, also has a kickass work ethic that makes me want to stand up and salute. Here’s how co-founder Erika Hall describes it.

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