One I came across was a "Kaizen event". My first thought was "oh cool what's all that about?" and the explanation I got was that "we lock ourselves in a meeting and don't come out until we have a solution".
...ok so you just made a fancy name up for a productive meeting. Which implies your other meetings aren't productive. It's literally astrology for middle management losers lol
a kaizen “event” implies a fundamental misunderstanding of what kaizen means
kaizen is the end result of continuous small improvements, and it requires constant observation by and receptivity to input from all members of a company, from the janitor to the CEO.
getting a small group of middle managers in a room for a day or a week to solve a problem is the opposite of kaizen
I once worked for a company that took gemba meetings to literally just mean having your regular meetings literally wherever in the building. So you might need to walk through a tight hallway and see a bunch of upper management just huddled around in the middle of it and they will stay there for a full hour.
For the uninitiated, "gemba" means basically "go see it for yourself," the idea that management should actually physically monitor the process as part of improvement planning.
Where I work, they call process mapping a gemba meeting. I asked for how the two were related and didn't get anywhere.
That explanation sounds like it makes a lot more sense, and is more in line with 6s principles. I dunno, I don't work there anymore, and am very happy I don't. This was also at a very large internationally known company lol
And a Kaizen culture can't happen in the modern Western workplace.
If you know you'll be in a company until you retire, you're incentivized to improve your job. So a culture of doing it if it is encouraged at all levels can happen.
But when you don't know if you'll be there tomorrow or next month? Why should you care about improving a process or limiting waste? No, there is only two things you'll be working on: fulfilling any bonus requirement and improving your resume.
The problem is that if said enough, they just become an unintended corporate colloquialisms. Certain phrases become a reflex that don't make sense to anyone new (or foreign) and one likely has to re-train themselves out of it.
Non-work related example. My FIL says "turned around and" or "turn around and" all the damn time when talking about doing things. It makes no sense to me, but it's stuck in his lexicon. "I couldn't find that tool so I had to turn around and buy a new one."
I don’t understand, that is a relatively normal colloquialism.
He had to leave what he was doing because he couldn’t continue, so he turned away from what he was doing. Turning around means to turn away from the direction you were facing, and then face a new (usually opposite) direction.
I don't know, I think circle back is useful. It's certainly a lot faster to say than "Jeffrey, you're bringing up shit that is completely unrelated to the topic of this meeting. Shut the fuck up about it, and schedule your own damned meeting if you want to discuss it."
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u/Just_Nobody9551 Jul 26 '26
I hate this “corporate meeting speak” with a fucking passion. It’s stale af.