Man spends 35 years collecting corporate waffle, turns it into an app

Why waste time thinking of something useful to say when an app can leverage synergies for you?

After suffering more than 10,000 corporate meetings, one executive has decided that the world hasn't endured nearly enough management jargon and built an app capable of generating 270 million variations of it.

Dave Doty, who claims to have spent 35 years collecting buzzwords, clichés, and other verbal atrocities inflicted on office workers, turned his life's work into Executive Eightball, an iPhone and Android app designed to help users sound convincingly corporate while saying nothing.

The idea came about after Doty spent decades recording the nonsense he heard in meetings, presumably while everyone else was busy circling back, touching base, and taking things offline.

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"I am an executive who has suffered through over 10,000 meetings during the course of my 30 year career," Doty told The Register. "To keep my sanity, in each of them, I wrote down all of the buzz words and business clichés and have built an enormous database of them."

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He described his creation as "sort of what would happen if Dilbert and George Costanza had a love child."

The app, which is now available on Apple's App Store and Google Play, takes Doty's collection of corporate waffle and assembles it into sentences that wouldn't look out of place in a CEO's quarterly update or a particularly painful all-hands meeting.

Among the pearls of wisdom it can produce are "We must dashboard the outputs to enable us to focus on operational directives and break the paradigm" and "Drive to cross-functional synergies so we can reengineer the organization and unleash shareholder value."

Doty claims Executive Eightball can produce approximately 270 million unique sentences in 15 languages, meaning workers across the globe can now contribute to meetings without the tiresome business of having an actual idea.

The app's listing promises to help users "Speak fluent corporate nonsense instantly," with suggested applications including office humor, LinkedIn jokes, presentation icebreakers, and, perhaps most appropriately, "Fake CEO energy."

There's a free version, although you'll have to put up with ads and a limited supply of corporate waffle. For $0.99, you can unlock the lot and talk complete rubbish to your heart's content.

The timing is rather fitting. In March, research covered by The Register suggested that people who enthusiastically embrace corporate buzzwords may actually be worse at their jobs. Now there's an app to help the rest of us catch up.

Doty, meanwhile, appears delighted with his contribution to the corporate world.

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"This is truly a paradigm shift for corporate leadership and my greatest lifetime contribution to society," he wrote in his latest email, urging potential customers to subscribe to the paid version to "unleash the value."

After 35 years and 10,000 meetings, at least someone has finally found a productive use for all that wasted time. ®