Hey You, Welcome! Here’s your weekly dose roasting tech spin, bluster and puffery. Laugh at the cringe, unjam your message.

This week in:

Already subscribed? Excellent. If not, subscribe below. It’s your antidote to boring meetings filled with circular conversations and strategic vagueness.

Tech Waffle Torture Explained - We tell you what corporate speak really means. You’re welcome.

Unified Communications as a Service

Original:
“We deliver an enterprise-grade Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) platform that brings voice, video, chat, and content sharing together in a single pane of glass. By leveraging AI-driven insights, presence-aware workflows, and seamless integrations across your existing tech stack, we empower hybrid teams to connect, collaborate, and execute in real time. With end-to-end encryption and an intuitive UX, our solution eliminates silos, reduces noise, and unlocks measurable productivity gains across the organisation.”

Translation:
“We put chat, calls, meetings, file chaos, and 47 types of notifications into one app so everyone can interrupt you faster. The ‘single pane of glass’ is just a bigger window for confusion but it looks fantastic on the CIO’s transformation slide.”

Meaningfully Shallow Values – You get them as short and sweet ugly truths

Efficiency

Lean Operations
“Doing more with less – especially with less people.”

Productivity Value
“Removing the humans who understood the process, then calling the chaos ‘agility.’”

Cost-Optimised Excellence
“Calling every budget cut ‘a breakthrough in optimisation.’”

Savage Takedowns – Spectator sport or heed the lesson

Zoom CEO v Zoom (2023 Classic, Still Hurts)

Yes, this one’s from 2023, but it’s too perfectly ironic to leave on the cutting-room floor. In a leaked all-hands, Zoom CEO Eric Yuan told employees that remote work on Zoom makes it hard to “build trust,” or “be as innovative“. The fix? Staff within 50 miles of an office should commute in at least two days a week.

Spectator Sport
Your entire brand is “we make remote work actually work,” and then you basically say: Look, you can’t really trust people or innovate on our product. Customers heard: If Zoom isn’t good enough for Zoom, why is it good enough for us?

Heed the Lesson
Yuan should have been more careful in how he communicated RTO - and said something like: “Zoom lets us work from anywhere. Being in the same room sometimes gives us another layer - the messy, serendipitous bits that happen between meetings.” In-person then becomes additive to what your product already does well, not a vote of no confidence in the product that is the reason for your existence.

Corporate Contagions – A field guide to the behaviourial disorders infecting the tech industry

Grandiose Narrative Disorder (GND)

Commonly known as: Narrative Inflation.
First spotted in sales decks, GND occurs when a straightforward solution demo mutates into a three-act, go-for-glory epic story that nobody asked for.

Symptoms
A simple capability overview becomes “the origin myth of our founder’s struggle,” a feature demo turns into “the hero’s journey of your data,” and prospects sit through “Once upon a time in the cloud…” before anyone mentions price, timelines, or whether it works with their stack.

Causes
Prolonged exposure to storytelling workshops and brand consultants insisting “no one remembers facts, only feelings.”

Treatment
Reintroduce boring but useful questions like, “What problem are you trying to solve, and by when?” Cap ‘stories’ at 120 seconds and limit pitches to one metaphor per meeting with automatic shutdown of any sentence starting with, “In a land far, far away…” or “It was a dark night of the soul”…

LinkedIn Popularity Templates – Syrupy, self-congratulatory. Surprisingly effective.

Template 27: The ‘From Rage 🤬#%&! to Emotional Control Milestone’ Post

Proud to share I hit a major milestone today: I sat through an entire meeting that clearly deserved violence… but chose corporate composure instead. 📈

Context: leadership has decided that my executive bonus for closing a $500M deal will be ‘equitably shared’ with the wider team – including several people who, while very valuable in their own way, did not spend six months living on caffeine, negotiating with hostile procurement, or being excoriated by our CEO at 11:47 pm! 😫

Instead of saying what I was thinking, I smiled, thanked everyone for “making this win possible,” and agreed that “we all did this together.”🙏

Apparently, that’s called growth. 🌱

If you, too, are learning to rebrand apoplectic resentment as ‘executive presence,’ hit 😬and comment “EVOLVING.”

#RageBaitMonday #LeadershipLousyJourney #SerenityOnFire #BonusInFlames

Got some naval gazing or philosophical musing you’d like to turn into a syrupy LinkedIn post? Reply to this email with your request and I’ll do my best.

Not Good News – Tech’s weekly highlight reel of hubris, hypocrisy and cringe

Australia’s Critical Industries: Data Risk Exposed, Silent, and Hoping You Don’t Notice

As reported by the ABC, FOI data shows Australia’s mining and manufacturing sectors have reported 187 data breaches since 2018, affecting up to 3.6 million people. Some operators took more than a year even to notice they’d been hacked – one took 520 days to detect an intrusion, then another 84 days to notify authorities. On average, companies waited an additional 39 days after detection before reporting breaches to the regulator. These are sectors that sit at the heart of power, resources, and supply chains - and they’re effectively operating with rearview-mirror cybersecurity.

My Take
We talk about cyber as a ‘top boardroom risk,’ but behave like it’s lost stationery - annoying, not urgent. Some operators aren’t just slow; they’re stalling, trying to protect share price and investor confidence by keeping breaches quiet and perhaps avoiding awkward questions about why they’re hoarding more personal data than they need. The irony is brutal: in trying to look stable, they look shady. Until detection and disclosure are treated like safety incidents, every delay just compounds the trust damage and risk to their operations.

What The Fluff (WTF)?! – Decoding tech, something that linguists, philosophers, and your boss refuse to do

Layer 8 Insights – Regular deep dives that explore the human error in tech.