This caustically funny Webster’s of the workplace cuts to the true meaning of the inane argot spouted in cubicles and conference rooms across the land. It’s time to face the facts: We live in the Golden Age of Bullshit. And as anyone who has ever worked in an office knows, the corporate world is a veritable sea of B.S.—and we are all drowning in it.   Thank God for Lois Beckwith, an actual human being with the courage and moral fiber to cut through the crap (so to speak) and give us citizens of the working world the lowdown on what all this corporate lingua franca  actually  means. Breathe easy.  The Dictionary of Corporate Bullshit  will make your job a whole lot easier, telling you how to get ahead ( kissing ass , playing  golf ), avoid annoying colleagues (use  caller ID ), and ride the elevator without ruining your career (if you  gossip , use pronouns, and  never  talk to the  CEO ).   If you have ever wondered what a  mindshare  is (some kind of drug?), puzzled over the meaning of words like  impactful  or  incentivize  (here’s a clue:  those are not actual words ), or been faced with a glassy-eyed zombie of a coworker singing the praises of  synergy , then  The Dictionary of Corporate Bullshit   is for you! Forget what you learned in  Bschool —this handy reference guide will teach you everything you need to know about the empty, enraging, and just plain stupid gobbledygook that masquerades as “communication” in the working world. Lois Beckwith is a corporate communications executive at a major media company in New York City. She is the author of the The Dictionary of Corporate Bullshit.  A accounts payable 1. department responsible for processing the fulfillment of invoices rendered to a company 2. one of the least glamorous and most underappreciated departments of any organization, as its staff members are seen as merely number-crunchers and paper-pushers; identified by sprawling and depressing cube farms, big calculators, and the palpable sense that the employees there know that no one knows their names and, really, doesn't care, and/or the thought, "I went into accounting because I thought it would grant me job security . . . but this sucks. And PS: Screw these elitist liberal arts grads hounding me for checks." 3. may behave as policy Nazis, due to the fact that any previous deviation from departmental rules (perhaps encouraged by an office flirt ) has resulted in serious repri-mand and multiple departmental memos 4. a black hole for invoices ; when you inquire about the status of an invoice , you will inevitably be met with the uncaring statement that there is no record of it and it must be resubmitted, indicating the need to begin the process all over again, even though your job depends on delivering a check the next day; and, resubmitting means securing sign-off from your boss , who is too busy having lunch at a nice restaurant to approve the payment of a bill. In extreme circumstances you will have to venture to the accounts payable department to physically retrieve an unsigned invoice , check, etc., to ensure payment and the avoidance of the cancellation of a priority contract. acronym 1. a term formed with some of the letters (often the initials) of a phrase, used as an abbreviation 2. "words" that are so prevalent in business that people will often string them together with a few articles to form a complete sentence, and worse, not even realize they are doing it. The fact that people constantly ask them to translate what they have just said does not deter them from doing this. 3. terms that are frequently indecipherable to those not "in the know" (i.e., people who speak plain English), and which therefore serve to alienate them and make them feel stupid. People may enlist the use of acronyms for this very purpose. action items 1. issues on a meeting agenda that require decisions 2. issues that are classified as such because no one wanted to deal with them/take responsibility for them in the last meeting , that suddenly require vetting , a deep dive, etc., and therefore will be tabled until the next meeting . Also see parking lot . actionable 1. giving grounds for legal action 2. that's right, this is a legal term, and doesn't actually mean "the things that can be done," as it's repeatedly hijacked by the smarty-pants who went to Bschool 3. the things that can actually be accomplished or moved forward on, e.g., boss: "Tom, how many of the eight items in this proposal would you say are actionable in the next six months?" Tom: "Uh, maybe two." add-value 1. to increase the worth of something by supplementing it with services, products, or access to resources 2. classic sales and marketing speak used to justify charging more than the competitor by offering frequently intangible and often unquantifiable things like "knowledge" or "experience," which are referred to as "value adds." Employees will continually be houn