Ever find yourself daydreaming about cocktail hour when you’re supposed to be listening to a colleague’s strategic plans for leveraging online initiatives to gain greater market share?
Before you know it, they’re throwing around words like “paradigm” and three letter acronyms like SEO. You’re standing in the hallway stuck between your office and another cup of coffee while they go on and on and on.
Whether you’re bored to tears or completely clueless, you can easily feign interest and acumen on any given business topic with just the right selection of well-timed phrases.
To help you through inordinately long and yawn-inducing office conversations, we put together a quick list of comments that can: 1.) offer an insightful perspective, and 2.) bring the conversation to a swift end.
- I was going to ping Legal before we pushed it through marketing.
- His team definitely has the bandwidth to complete the project, the only question is can they come up with a scalable solution?
- I think it would be a real numbers push, but accounting will never go for it.
- Seth Godin has a great spin on [insert business topic here], you should check out his blog.
- I think it would be a real sales push, but marketing will never go for it.
- I thought the same thing, but wanted to take the convo offline before I made any decisions.
- You know, this fits right into our new economy business model.
- I think it would be a real marketing push, but compliance will never go for it.
- I’d like to fast-track it, but no one is ever going to sync up unless we offer a value-added solution.
- You should blog about that.
Make sure your colleague knows the conversation is over by giving a quick pat on the side of her arm and finish up with something like, “Let me know how that goes,” or “Keep me in the loop,” and then get to the safety of your office ASAP.
Use the comments sparingly and be careful not to dish out the same one with the same colleague more than once. With the right timing and on-your-feet-thinking, you can talk business even when you’re thinking beer.