Why call so much attention to a harmless cliché? Because clichés aren't so harmless when they overtake the business lexicon. They turn off the people they're supposed to enlighten and motivate, and they trivialize important concepts and accomplishments. Marketing buzz terms like paradigm shift and inflection point are bad enough, but buzz axioms take the art of business technology communications to a deeper low.

Take the we eat our own dog food mantra, recited by tech vendors and customers alike. With all due respect to the fine folks at Purina, IT innovators shouldn't compare the fruits of their nimble intellects to clumps of meat and meat byproducts. And they certainly don't want to be feeding that stuff to their employees. If what you're trying to convey is that your company tries out homegrown technology on itself before rolling it out to customers and partners, articulate the importance of that practice in a more precise, constructive way.

A colleague who's a senior technologist for a Fortune 1000 company bristles at managers who exhort him to think outside the box. Forget that "the box" even exists, he reasons, and you'll be that much more innovative. Which boxes were the likes of Steve Jobs, Tim Berners-Lee and Linus Torvalds thinking outside of when they dared to question longheld tenets of computing?

Just because business clichés morph with the times doesn't mean they get more profound. For instance, the old saw that no one ever got fired for buying IBM has been extrapolated to Microsoft and Cisco, despite the lock-in, reliability, security and pricing issues that continue to sidetrack the careers of more than a few of those vendors' customers.

Sometimes, the cliché slingers don't even get their clichés straight. The CEO of another colleague's former employer regularly urged middle managers to "talk the talk and walk the talk," which his drones dutifully repeated to their own reports. Was this CEO a source of inspiration, or confusion? Was he respected, or ridiculed?

Too many business managers these days remind me of Peter Arnell, the spinmeister charged with positioning the Aquafina bottled water brand for PepsiCo. "We've got to take the asset called water and move it to an unexpected place," he recently told The Wall Street Journal. "The moment you treat it like water, you're dead."

OK, so Arnell and his ilk may be operating on some other planet, but don't be so sure your company's cliché-laden conversations aren't moving technology and other critical subjects "to an unexpected place." If you work with serious professionals -- especially other technologists who tend to think literally -- leave the canned phrases, abstract imagery and bluster to the brand consultants and management gurus, and get straight to the point.

Is mindless management speak all too common at your company? How has it affected your company's culture? Who are the main offenders? What's the business or technology buzz phrase du jour? Share the drivel at the e-mail address below.