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Why Invent New Words? Just be Clear
Even before the IBM commercial where the employees play “buzzword bingo” during a meeting, anyone even tangentially connected to the business world could tell you that corporate America was turning the English language into its personal playground. Similar to the way politicians carefully choose their words to convey the proper emotion and stay on message, businesses have invented terms like “offshoring” to mask the negative effects of losing jobs overseas, and “result-driven” or “value-added” to emphasize positive terms. Sometimes this process goes too far, and someone steps in to say “enough!” In England, that responsibility fell to the Local Government Association, after a local town council began calling brainstorming “thought showers” instead.
In this case the public sector was the offending party, but the LGA’s list can be effectively applied to any business as well. Customers and employees don’t understand many of the words thrown around at board meetings and in press releases today. If you read about a company incentivizing a top-down transformation to facilitate empowerment, how many second looks would it take before you knew what the business was doing? (Note: if you do understand that sentence upon reading it for the first time, it might be time for a vacation)
Maybe I’m biased as a writer, but every time I see another word become part of the business-speak lexicon (i.e. myriad, overused more times than I care to count), I feel like it’s been stolen from the rest of us forever. It might make you feel smarter to use long, important-sounding words, but save them for the next game of Scrabble. To the people that have to try and decipher their meaning, using those words implies you’re trying to hide something that would be evident in a clearer, more concise statement. So from now on, instead of championing a sustainable stakeholder vision, please just come up with a long-term customer plan. Save everyone the translation headaches.
What are some examples of business-speak you’ve come across that strike you as unnecessarily verbose?
**Image from Teach on Purpose blog**
'Buzz' is often pointless, if you don't use a word in everyday speak, why use it business when you are trying to get a point across or sell a product?
It's not just the new words that chap my rear, it's the nonsensical phrases like "not in my wheelhouse" and "end-to-end enterprise-wide solution". How about we all talk like people for a change?
I question why companies waste so much time thinking up buzzwords and other jargon instead of using their time wisely. Yes, it is nice to please the investors, but really the bottom line is the customer. Without customers business will collapse. I wonder if companies were to spend more time focusing on more efficient ways to please customers, how the investors would feel if their stock went up.
I agree completely. I used to be an editor for a B2B publication before becoming an industry analyst, and I can't tell you how many press releases went into the trash can because I didn't want to take the time to figure out what was being said. Too many companies write press releases for their investors -- not for magazine editors and others trying to actually understand what they are trying to say.
Bravo. Thank you for making such a great point Jeremy. If companies focused more of their time having straightforward conversations with their customers vs. thinking up new words to use that their customers don't even understand -- the world would be a much better place and companies would be much more successful.
A great tool for generating non-sensical web-speak is: http://www.dack.com/web/bullshit.html