(The 30,000-Foot View is an annoying business phrase and is just one of the 212 Most Annoying Business Phrases Managers Effuse, Confuse, and Overuse detailed in the hilarious must-have guide for every workplace: The 30,000-Pound Gorilla in the Room. Available right now on Amazon.)

30,000-Foot View

This annoying phrase often has its annoyance factor magnified by those who don’t understand its meaning or origin. A 30,000-foot view is simply meant to describe the view from a commercial airplane (flying, of course, at 30,000 feet).

However, when used in business, its intention is to convey the notion that someone is considering everything; that is, they see the big picture.

The phrase is most often uttered by pompous managers who believe they see and consider the whole shebang, while the rest of us are too small-minded or too focused on the minutia to understand much beyond our current five-foot-eleven-inch view.

Of course, because so many don’t fully understand where the saying originated, you’ll often hear businesspeople refer to a 5,000-foot view, a 100,000-foot view, and everything in between.

While writing this book, we even heard a television journalist discussing, “The 65,000-foot view.”

Clearly, he enjoys more than twice the vision of the average reporter… or your pompous manager.

Replacement phrases: The Big Picture. (We know this is also clichéd, but at least everyone will understand the meaning.)

See also: Land the Plane

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The 30,000-Pound Gorilla in the Room is available on Amazon.