Buzzwords, ever thought about the downsides?

There are buzz-words everyone is talking about nowadays that are synonymous for efficiency and process improvement. If I think about it: Efficiency and Continuous improvement are such buzz-words themselves. All of you will have come across some already and there is no way they won’t catch up on you on a regular basis anyways. A commonality across these words is that they give off positive connotations.

Take ‘team-work’ for example: It is the paragon for decisions that account to all sides of a critical topic and workload-distribution to specialists. Therefore it is said that teamwork will always save you a lot of time, because of distributing work to several people, and that it will always help you choose the best possible decision, because you’ll have considered every possibility and found one that has all benefits but no shortcomings.

Is that right? Aren’t there any downsides of teamwork? What about the time you “waste” on the Forming, the Storming and the Norming parts of the work-process . Time you could have easily used to work efficiently on your own. You should also think about how solid the base of your decision-making process is. Even if you think you have considered every possible shortcoming of your decision, that doesn’t mean that you really have… What if your team is very diverse in itself, but it doesn’t include one person that really presents the customer’s point-of-view to your product? Also, what could be the downsides of not having specialists on your team? Some people just talk out of their mind without the same level of analysis…

This was just one example…

Other fancy buzz-words that seem to be wholly positive and aren’t considered with their downsides can be seen pretty much everywhere. There are only a couple of them that I can spontaneously think of now, but there are dozens of them out there, like: teamwork, social media, continuous improvement, synergies, connectivity, transparency, work time flexibility, centralization …

Be aware of people who use them without thinking, these words are just labels, the depth and wisdom of the concept they convey depends entirely on the speaker.

What other buzz-words have you come across that you think are seen to be too positive and aren’t considering the downsides? And what downsides could you think of?