All those phrases originally meant something. I think they become management speak via two mechanisms: 1. People use them shorn of their original meaning to del

All those phrases originally meant something. I think they become management speak via two mechanisms: 1. People use them shorn of their original meaning to deliver the appearance of being managerial without the substances or 2. People raise them to rock-solid rules and demand slavish conformance to them without thought about costs/benefits or appropriateness. For bonus points, mix the two up, so that not only is someone trying to sound managerial but failing by using the terms completely incorrectly, but then also rigidly enforce their incorrect understandings. For instance, if you have lots of meetings and those meetings almost never produce "action items", and/or those action items never get done, you really do have a problem. If you don't like calling them action items, fine, find another word, but it'll be the same thing. But if you get a manager that insists that meetings always produce action items, no matter what, you get another sort of failure. It is a perfectly valid use of a meeting to get two groups together and just make sure they are on the same page about something. If that's all you ever meet about, there may be a deeper problem you should dig into, this shouldn't be your dominant form of meeting (unless you're in a position where that's your direct job), but it does sometimes need to happen. I find it useful to dig down to the "original" meaning of a lot of these terms, think about what they mean and how to use them in my own head to put terminology on things, but not to be rigid about it. I also observe that there are some managers who use the terms essentially correctly, and some that clearly fit into at least one of the two categories I listed at the beginning. They should be treated differently.