Mary in Dallas started hearing cadence at work in phrases like business cadence and organization cadence. In office jargon, it refers to a regular rhythm for scheduling, product releases, reporting, or sales targets. The business use may have been popularized at IBM in the 1990s through a sales paper called Chaos to Cadence, which described moving sales from Wild West unruliness toward shared metrics and routines. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Business Buzzword “Cadence” Means Steady, Efficient Rhythm”
Hello, you have A Way with Words.
Hi, this is Mary.
Hi, Mary, where are you calling from?
I’m calling from Dallas.
Dallas, well, welcome to the show.
I had noticed a new word showing up at work. We had some changes where new people were coming in, and this buzzword that I call buzzword started showing up called cadence. And it seemed a very odd word to me, and they were talking about business cadence, organization cadence, and I didn’t know what it meant. And so I was just really curious as to where it came from and how these things come out.
So the word is cadence, C-A-D-E-N-C-E, cadence.
Yes.
This is a buzzword that’s catching on in business, referring to, say, scheduling or the regular release of products. It has that sort of rhythmic cadence like a drum. And it may have been popularized by IBM, which was using this term back in the 90s. They wrote a big paper, in fact, called About Chaos to Cadence. And it had to do with taking the world of sales, which can be sort of like the Wild West of business because you have to be very nimble and innovative and resourceful. And sales was kind of regarded as unruly and not very disciplined. And so there was a movement within IBM to go from chaos to cadence. And that is making things much more regularized, developing metrics for reporting the results of sales and that kind of thing.
And it seems like cadence has caught on in the business world. It’s caught on enough that people are grumbling about it on the internet as being overused jargon. I had never heard it before and not in our company. And it was just something that seems to have popped up and now everybody’s trying to use it.
And are people rolling their eyes there? Are they grumbling about it or are they embracing it?
A couple of us have looked at each other to say, like, what is this? I actually like the word cadence. There’s something very comfortable to me about it. It feels very secure. It’s like you could just sort of lean back into it and have it support you somehow. To me, I guess it’s about getting organized and doing something on a regular basis. It sounds like one of those things. It’s not about an offbeat drum. It’s more about a steady drum.
Right, right. And it’s about everybody marching to the same drummer, for sure. And having the same targets. Everybody knows where they need to be. They know what the next step is, what the next note is.
Yeah, they’re focused.
Yeah. So instead of all these different silo operations operating on their own terms, their own time.
Yeah.
Very interesting. Well, Mary, thanks for calling about this. I bet there are going to be all these people who, you know how when you hear a word for the first time and then you start hearing it everywhere, there’s going to be this steady cadence of cadence out there in the world for them. So thank you for calling.
Thank you.
Thanks, Mary. Take care now.
Bye-bye.
Bye-bye.
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