When I Worked At Chrysler I Kept A Glossary Of Ridiculous Corporate Terms Engineers Overused At Meetings. Here Is That Glossary

When I became a full-time engineer at Chrysler at age 21, there were certain elements of the corporate environment that I found flat-out odd. Why were all the engineers working in gray cubicles while the designers and businesspeople were literally in their own, colorful, beautiful buildings? Why did designers and businessfolks have better lunchrooms than engineers? Why does everyone leave at exactly 4:30? Why are engineers not allowed to use tools without having getting union grievances filed against them? Why did so few employees actually love cars? I could go on and on, but the thing I want to talk about today is the corporate buzzwords/strange terms used in the hallowed halls of the Chrysler Technical center circa 2015. I kept a list.

You might have read our article “One Ford Executive Created A List Of Mixed Metaphors And Malaprops Heard Around The Office And It’s Hilarious,” which was based on a great find by the Wall Street Journal. It turns out, a Ford exec would meticulously document any time he heard some sort of tortured mixed metaphor, and the list he jotted down is fantastic.

This article reminded me of my own list of tortured terms that I heard in the engineering halls of a major automaker. Specifically, this was in the halls of the Chrysler Technical Center, a humongous building in Auburn Hills that was, at least when I was there between 2013 and 2015, occupied on weekdays by 15,000 people. It was a larger-than-life epicenter of automotive development, with everyone from technicians to engineers to execs to designers all in the second largest office complex in the U.S. (second to the Pentagon).

Chrysler felt old-school when I got there after college. Mostly middle-aged men would walk through the turnstiles everyday at 7:30 AM with the same lunch pail they’d carried the day before, eating the same lunch, going through many of the same routines. There was plenty of bureaucracy, folks all wore khakis and polo shirts/dress paints and button-downs, and in many ways it kinda felt like a movie scene of the corporate world from the 1950s. That’s not to say it wasn’t an amazing place to work, because in many ways it was, but again, the point here is that my 21 year-old self — with little industry experience — found some of the corporate-speak to be really, really fascinating.

For some reason, I decided to jot some of that corporate-speak down, using a title page usually reserved for official, top-secret engineering documents. In this case, I was too lazy to change the title from “Alternator Performance Requirements — 12V.” (Unrelated: I was for a while trying to get the electrical team together to give a “load budget” so that we’d know if the Motor Generator Unit — MGU — we’d chosen for the Jeep Wrangler JL was sized appropriately. How can we know if we have the right “alternator” if we don’t know what our electrical load is? Why was I doing this as a cooling system engineer, you might wonder? Because I realized nobody else at the company was doing it. Yes, Chrysler was the wild west, and in a way, it was awesome). 

My document, titled COMMON ENGINEERING WORDS V13 (yes, apparently there were 13 versions of this. Or maybe that was a joke), begins with the Holy Grail of Chrysler corporate terms — one so overused that it drove my friends and me absolutely bonkers.

“To your point.”

What the hell even is this corporate phrase, grammatically? “To your point?” Why use the preposition “to?” This makes literally zero sense, and I’m not the only schmuck who thinks this.

The way this would be used is, someone would say something at a meeting, then someone else who was trying to get some words in so as to appear contributory would need to make a transition. This is where they’d deploy the atomic bomb of transitions: “to your point.”

“To your point, Bob, we really need to make sure our electrical load budget accounts for accessories like winches and the like.”

This statement need not have anything whatsoever to do with what Bob said. Such is the magic of “to your point.” Some refer to it as an “active listening” phrase; it’s basically meaningless, and means “I’m gonna talk now.” And my god was it overused at Chrysler.

“Deep dive” was also a heavily used phrase around Chrysler. It basically meant “let’s actually do some engineering. Let’s stop pulling stuff out of our arses, and let’s do a bit of digging.” I also liked the term “root cause,” because nobody ever said the silent “analysis” at the end. “Let’s do a root cause on that heater warmup issue on JL GME-T4,” one might say. It meant basically: “Let’s get all the nerds together and do a bit of investigating on the core of this issue.”

“Due diligence” was another corporate term that was used all the time. It’s a term that sounds nice and makes the sayer seem like a real, thoughtful, hard-working engineer. Though what it ultimately means is: Don’t be lazy. Look at this issue from all possible angles. I have it on the list because it was way, way overused.

One of my favorite terms used at Chrysler was “let’s look at the data.” This would often be uttered immediately after someone made a major claim, especially if it was a dubious one. “We expect a 3 MPG increase from this Active Grille Shutter Strategy,” an engineer might say. Someone would express their doubts, there’d be an argument, and then the doubter would say: “Let’s look at the data.” It meant “I don’t believe you.” It was sometimes used as a trump card to shut someone up, because ultimately: Data don’t lie.

“Can you go back a slide?” was a classic. You see, at Chrysler, lots of folks were just on their laptops during meetings, many not paying any attention (I was on Jalopnik quite often, if I’m being honest). “Can you go back a slide?” was a frequently-used way to make it seem like you were actually listening.

“Directionally correct” was an absolute classic at Chrysler. It basically just meant “at least this thing is leading us closer to the outcome we want, and not further.” I’d never heard “directionally correct” in my whole life, but at Chrysler I’d hear it basically daily.

Another favorite was “high level,” which basically meant “dumbed down.” And “low hanging fruit,” which basically meant changes we can make easily to get us closer to the desired outcome.

A strange one was “This five minutes,” which was used a lot by the former MR (Model Responsible) of the Jeep Wrangler JL, but also by others. “Use the Samsung data because that’s who our supplier is this five minutes.” What a bizarre expression. Why not just say “at the moment”? I have no clue.

A “recovery slide” was a thing I’d only ever heard at the Tech Center. It means: “Man, we are SCREWED. Put together a slide that we can show our bosses so they know we’re working on this because otherwise we’re getting yelled at.”

“Plan of record” I had also never heard prior to Chrysler. It means “the official plan.” There might be a dozen different engineering designs/suppliers/product plans, but what was the official corporate plan for a vehicle program was what was referred to as “plan of record.” It was always exciting when some cool, advanced technology became plan-of-record (though often times it’d be cut later in the program).

“Let’s circle back” meant “You guys go get the actual answer please and come back and tell me about it,” while having a “small circle” usually meant “I don’t want input from some of the folks in this meeting.” The use of “worst case” in my department was basically a way to figure out one single “worst-case” test that could be our sizing/design point. “Use Davis Dam J2807 as your worst case,” for example. Though I suspect in other departments it was used similarly to figure out the most adverse situation a given design might face.

Another weird one from a grammar standpoint was “I can speak to that.” Why? Because grammatically, if you can “speak to” something it means you can attest to it. “I can speak to his skills as a programmer, as I worked with him for years,” one might say. But at Chrysler, that’s not how engineers used this phrase. “I can speak to that” just meant “I have words I can say about this topic.”

“I can speak to the water pump’s performance. It looks like, according to the data, our flow rates are too high in our aluminum lines, leading to erosion concerns, but I’ll pull up this recovery slide and show you the root cause, plus we can do a small-circle after this and discuss low-hanging fruit to get us back on track.”

So many engineers used the phrase “relative to” in the strangest way. They’d go on and on about something, and then say “relative to alternator performance” or “relative to the transfer case” — all at the very end of the sentence. For what seemed like an eternity you’d have zero clue what the hell they were talking about until that “relative to” dropped at the end, and you’d have to try to remember what the speaker had been blabbering on about for 30 seconds.

“The art of the possible” was used to try to understand what solutions were at our disposal, “got my steps in” meant “dang this meeting was far away from my desk,” and “eye chart” meant some kind of chart or graph or page that was difficult to see. What a weird phrase, right? “Yikes, what’s that say there on the Y-axis? This thing’s a bit of an eye-chart.”

Anyway, before I conclude I’d like to mention a few more phrases I heard during my time engineering at Chrysler (the list above isn’t my latest and greatest; that one is sadly lost to time). One is “this is invention.” This, usually said in a negative manner, literally meant “nobody else is doing this. Why the hell are we gonna be the first?” (Yes, that says a lot about Chrysler’s overall philosophy, but we won’t get into that). There was also “10 pounds of sh*t in a five pound bag,” which referenced a tight packaging situation (like when we put the relatively complex new turbo four-cylinder into the JL engine bay). Plus there was “let’s take this offline,” which meant “we gotta stop talking about this now. Let’s deal with it later.”

Then there was “Does the customer care/Will the customer notice?”

This one is my favorite because I remember being in dozens of meetings in which engineers would spend ages poring through data, trying to solve a problem, and in the end one person would quip: “What does this mean to the customer?”

And then the room will go silent, and everyone will realize they just wasted two hours.

God I love engineers.

h/t: Clay Johnson!