Sometimes on Saturday mornings, as I go through my feeds, my mind starts wandering to strange places. Today, my feeds are filled with acronyms. “The secret to sales success is captured by, [Insert your favorite methodology acronyms…]” Or “Use this process to develop the best AI prompts [again a set or acronyms that we can’t easily remember].”
In reading these, I’ve come to recognize what I call, “Strategic Word Salad.” Start with a word, then mix other words to represent each letter of the word, a bunch of nouns strung together, maybe some bullet points starting with the letter in the word. But with this word salad, we have the secrets to success.
As a results we have lists and lists of acronyms—most I’ve actually forgotten what they stand for, but I know if I do them, I will be successful. We are filled with acronyms around methodoogies. The MEDDIC, MEDDICC, MEDDPICC family. SPICED, BANT, SPIN, CHAMP, NEAT, and even FORD (Which must make Chevy owners jealous.) We see the same with prompt engineering with TREE, SCORE, REACT, CLEAR, OSCAR, and others.
We’ve created an entire language that has little to do with strategy and what we do, but is full of colorful acronyms that give us confidence and makes us sound important, even if we don’t remember what they mean or how to apply them.
My competitive nature force me to think. How can I come up with something that goes far beyond what these achieve? How can I develop the acronym of all acronyms, that encompasses everything we need to know for mastery in selling, prompting, GTM (oops, forgot about that acronym)?
At first I came up with “GRIT,” Generate Random Insight Terminology. But I realized I was aiming far to low. I thought we have a whole alphabet to choose from! Then it struck me—the answer IS the alphabet–A-Z!
I started talking to my buddy, ChatGPT, we came up with the one thing that covers everything. ChatGPT calle it a “critically curated collection of the most overused, underdefined, perpetually recycled buzzwords that have infiltrated every framework, every playbook, every AI prompt, and every keynote.” (Sometimes ChatGPT has it’s own way with words.)
And we’ve come up with it!
Drumroll please……
Introducing the complete, A-Z of Strategic Nonsense!
- A is for Alignment
- B is for Buy-In
- C is for Champion
- D is for Discovery
- E is for Enablement
- F is for Framework
- G is for Growth
- H is for Handoff
- I is for Insight
- J is for Journey
- K is for KPI
- L is for Leverage
- M is for Momentum
- N is for Narrative
- O is for Objection
- P is for Pipeline
- Q is for Qualify
- R is for Repeatability
- S is for Synergy—or possibly Scaling
- T is for Trust
- U is for Unlock
- V is for Value
- W is for Win-Win
- X is for eXperience (I had to cheat on this one)
- Y—this is interesting. Some of you are getting an updated version of the post. ChatGPT doesn’t know it’s alphabet and I didn’t check. It forgot Y. As a result, I suspect Y is for Yikes!!! Some might think Y is for Yes, others Y is for Yawn.
- Z is for Zoom–whether expressed as a noun, verb, metaphor
I hope you recognize the sheer magic of this approach. We no longer have to remember an acronym. We all know the alphabet and how to go from A to Z.
The other piece of magic, is we don’t have to go through each of these words sequentially, like we have to with the other acronyms. We can start anywhere we wan, choose the pieces that seem most relevant and ignore the others.
ChatGPT came up with a better idea than I did on these. Its suggestion is stunning:
- Pick any 3-5 words from this list.
- Arrange them in a vaguely purposeful order–it might only be meaningful to you, that’s all that’s important.
- Put them in a triangle, bow-tie, circle, or perhaps best, an infinity loop.
- Add the word, “Modern,” or “AI Driven”
- Bill clients accordingly.
Notice the words that are missing from this list of A-Z of Strategic Nonsense. We tend to avoid them because they are really tough.
Words like, Why, What If, Who, How, So-What, What’s this mean, Why is this important.
These are tough, so it’s far easier to fall back to our A-Z of Strategic Nonsense.
There are other great ways to use these words. Years ago, I used to create these Buzzword Bingo Cards. I would create a bunch, hand them to friends, and we’d sit in conferences, listening to speakers, playing Buzz-Word Bingo.
Now we can great great value for our customers. We can hand them a Buzzword Bingo Card. Or in our enablement workshops, each participant can do the same. Imagine the possibilities!
In winding this up, all I can say is, “Let the games begin!” Next time you are in a meeting, pull out this A-Z list and start checking off the words people string together during the meeting. Strategy may be dead, but these bingo and strategic word salad lives forever.
….enough for a Saturday morning, off to the gym…
Afterword: Here is the AI based conversation of this post. It’s funny listening to this discussions. These AI speakers struggle with pure sarcasm and snarkiness. This post really has no redeeming value than just poking fun at how we get caught up in these thing.
But interestingly, they take what’s intended to be humorous and extract some interesting insights and meaning. Enjoy!
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