Corporate clichés.

By Gonzalo López Martí  – Creative director, etc. /  lmmiami.com

• “Low-hanging fruit.”
• “Where the rubber meets the road.”
• Corporate clichés come in all shapes and sizes.
• Metaphors, analogies, haikus and limericks.
• I know people who’ve built pretty decent careers on a handful of clichés delivered with appropriate certitude and panache.
• “Move fast and break things.”
• This last one was used to be hailed as a Silicon Valley mantra of dynamism and innovation.
• As of late it tends to be frowned upon as a symbol of reckless, adolescent hubris.
• “We’ll fix it in post.”
• George Lucas, James Cameron and Steven Spielberg might beg to differ.
• “New & improved.”
• Advertising and social media are obvious culprits for an awful lot of the clichés that surround us.
• Most memes are indeed clichés and vice versa.
• A considerable quantity of them, nevertheless, carry a grain of truth.
• “That meeting could’ve been an email.”
• A truism so true it hurts.
• The amount of air travel we could avoid if people read emails is intractable.
• Unfortunately, the ability of most humans, even college educated ones, to express themselves in writing, let alone comprehend a text, is very limited.
• It is true though that meeting face to face with one’s five senses in action adds lots of conscious and subconscious cues and layers to human communication.
• “Good is better than perfect” or “Done is better than perfect”.
• I couldn’t agree more (the latter, allegedly, is a favorite of Google employees).
• “When the sage points at the moon, the fool looks at the finger.”
• I love this one (it is a Chinese proverb or so I’m told).
• The Spanish language is not foreign to the profusion of platitudes.
• “Bueno, bonito y barato.”
• Not only is it lame, it is impossible.
• A recipe for disappointment.
• Pure, unadulterated wishful thinking.