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.

WE CAME UP SHORT.

We just wrapped up a shorter-than-normal, urgent-as-ever fundraising drive and we came up about $45,000 short of our $300,000 goal.

That means we're going to have upwards of $350,000, maybe more, to raise in online donations between now and June 30, when our fiscal year ends and we have to get to break-even. And even though there's zero cushion to miss the mark, we won't be all that in your face about our fundraising again until June.

So we urgently need this specific ask, what you're reading right now, to start bringing in more donations than it ever has. The reality, for these next few months and next few years, is that we have to start finding ways to grow our online supporter base in a big way—and we're optimistic we can keep making real headway by being real with you about this.

Because the bottom line: Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism Mother Jones exists to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we hope you might consider pitching in before moving on to whatever it is you're about to do next. We really need to see if we'll be able to raise more with this real estate on a daily basis than we have been, so we're hoping to see a promising start.

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WE CAME UP SHORT.

We just wrapped up a shorter-than-normal, urgent-as-ever fundraising drive and we came up about $45,000 short of our $300,000 goal.

That means we're going to have upwards of $350,000, maybe more, to raise in online donations between now and June 30, when our fiscal year ends and we have to get to break-even. And even though there's zero cushion to miss the mark, we won't be all that in your face about our fundraising again until June.

So we urgently need this specific ask, what you're reading right now, to start bringing in more donations than it ever has. The reality, for these next few months and next few years, is that we have to start finding ways to grow our online supporter base in a big way—and we're optimistic we can keep making real headway by being real with you about this.

Because the bottom line: Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism Mother Jones exists to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we hope you might consider pitching in before moving on to whatever it is you're about to do next. We really need to see if we'll be able to raise more with this real estate on a daily basis than we have been, so we're hoping to see a promising start.

payment methods

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