What is Boardroom Suggestion?

Boardroom Suggestion is an exploitable four-panel comic where an executive asks his team for ideas, hears two safe answers he likes, then throws the third employee out the window for suggesting what customers actually want.

Where did Boardroom Suggestion come from?

The comic started as "Outlook Oust," a Nintendo Wii U strip posted by the webcomic Hejibits on December 24th, 2012, and picked up wider attention when Engadget's Joystiq column linked to it on December 29th, 2012.

What does Boardroom Suggestion mean?

The joke targets the gap between what real consumers want and what corporate executives assume they want, with the window-toss punchline standing in for how sensible ideas get killed inside big companies, a beat Spanish site Cuanto Cabron riffed on for a Cartoon Network programming variant (translated from Spanish).

How do you use Boardroom Suggestion?

People swap in a company or industry for the boss, keep the three-employee setup, and rewrite the final panel with the consumer request that gets the character thrown out the window, as seen in edits ranging from Nintendo Wii U debates to MTV programming and Cartoon Network scheduling.

Is Boardroom Suggestion still popular?

Usage tapered off after the 2013 burst but the extended and reversed versions got a second wind on Reddit in June 2019, particularly on /r/dankmemes and /r/memes, keeping the format in rotation as a classic exploitable.

Boardroom Suggestion

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Published August 16, 2026

Boardroom Suggestion is an exploitable four-panel comic where a boss asks his team for ideas, likes two safe answers, then throws the third employee out the window for suggesting what customers actually want. It started as a Hejibits Nintendo Wii U strip in December 2012 and became one of the most edited corporate-satire templates of the early 2010s.

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Overview

Boardroom Suggestion is an exploitable four-panel comic that satirizes how corporate executives misread their own customers. Each strip opens with a boss asking three employees for new product ideas, hears two on-brand answers he likes, then throws the third employee out the window for suggesting something people would actually want3.

The comic pairs stiff webcomic art with a repeating staging: three seated employees, a boss at the head of the table, and one very load-bearing window. Fans redraw the panels for different corporate targets and different rejected ideas, but the last-panel window toss always stays. The format sits alongside other business-boardroom exploitables like Corporate Logic and All Right, Gentlemen3.

Gallery

Origin & Background

Platform

Hejibits webcomic (origin) / Reddit and 4chan (viral spread)

Creator

Hejibits

Date

2012

The original strip, titled "Outlook Oust," appeared on the webcomic site Hejibits on December 24th, 2012, showing a Nintendo boardroom debating features for the then-new Wii U console3. The employee who gets thrown out the window suggests something Wii U fans had actually been asking for, and that punchline structure became the blueprint for every edit that followed.

How It Spread

Engadget's Joystiq Weekly Webcomic Wrapup picked up "Outlook Oust" on December 29th, 2012, listing it alongside strips from Penny Arcade and Corpse Run in that week's roundup and giving the comic its first push outside Hejibits' regular audience1. Within days, 4chan's /b/ board opened a January 3rd, 2013 draw thread that stacked over three hundred replies and roughly a hundred variant comics. Screenshots hit Reddit's /r/4chan on January 5th, an MTV-themed edit posted to /r/funny the same day pulled over 7,500 upvotes and 195 comments in nine days, Cheezburger's Memebase highlighted a snack-food edit on January 11th, and a dedicated "Boardroom Suggestion Memes" Facebook page passed 4,400 likes within a day of launching on January 14th3.

The template also jumped languages. Spanish humor site Cuanto Cabron ran a Cartoon Network programming variant, with commenters arguing about which older cartoons the network should be reviving instead of its current lineup (translated from Spanish)2. The extended version drawn by Cheezburger user Whiteoverblue in February 2013, in which the boss actually adopts the last employee's idea instead of throwing him out, got a second wind in June 2019 when redditor AidanOrsargos revived it on /r/dankmemes and posted a reversed edit to /r/memes the following day, both pulling tens of thousands of upvotes.

How to Use This Meme

The typical edit swaps in a company or industry for the boss, keeps the three-employee seating and the open window, and rewrites the final panel with the 'unspeakable' consumer request that gets the character defenestrated. Common convention keeps the first two suggestions as bland corporate-safe ideas so the third one lands hard. Extended edits sometimes reverse the beat and have the boss actually take the last employee's advice.