Business Jargon
November 15, 2006

Q: Hi Steve!  I was recently at a business meeting and there was this guy there who simply loved to use business jargon.  If he wasn't talking about "buy-ins" or "sacred cows" he was babbling on about "pinging" someone or "leveraging" ideas.  Please help me stop the madness!  Thanks. -- Mike

A:  At the end of the day Mike, it's all about delivering the goods and gaining traction while maintaining some wiggle room. If you don't grab the low hanging fruit, if you fail to partner with the right team, you might become a hatchet man with no value added.

Yes, the use of jargon in business can get out of hand, and when it does, it can have significant consequences. One small example: I hired a consultant recently (let's call him Jeff) and when we speak I find that I don't always understand everything Jeff is saying. So far, I have chalked it up to the fact that we typically discuss an area of business in which he is far more knowledgeable than I.

But then I spoke with a friend who had recently been pitched by the same consultant. His take? "Jeff uses a lot of words and jargon to actually say very little. I got almost nothing of any real value from his presentation." That has me re-thinking not only my communication problems with Jeff (it's not me, it's him), but in fact my business relationship with him as well (and needless to say, he didn't get my friend's business.)

The danger of jargon is that it allows people to think they sound smarter than they actually might be. It too often becomes a crutch. Using big-sounding words to say little wastes everyone's time.

This is not to say that some business jargon doesn't have a place, because it does. Longtime readers of this column know that I am not immune from using phrases like "buzz" or "drill-down," but I do think there is a big difference between using jargon to illustrate a point and using it to obfuscate one.

Consider this statement I recently ran across: "One of [Corp X] corporate objectives is to develop strategic relationships with key customers and be recognized for our ability to deliver services of superior value. This competitive advantage will be achieved through continued focus on our core competencies, management attention to the development of operations and process management excellence . . . ."

Please tell me what that means.

Here are some of the phrases that are the worst offenders, meaning, phrases that seem to sound interesting but which mask a laziness or arrogance or ignorance (or just bug me):

Interface: You interface with a computer screen, you do not interface with a person.

Face-time: Similarly, when you need to speak to another human being, that is called talking, or maybe not, maybe now it's called interfacing during face-time.

Proactive: You can be reactive, or you can be active. Proactive sounds like a deodorant.

Value-added: Is there not value there already? If so, why does it need to be added?

Value proposition: This big-sounding phrase really says nothing. What is the value-proposition of this sentence, that I may bore you with my faux-intelligence?

Incent: Apparently meaning to encourage, this word is one of many in which perfectly fine nouns (incentive) are turned into verbs.

Synergy: Today, synergy has come to mean that the whole is bigger than the sum of its parts. But my personal hero, Buckminster Fuller, the man who coined the phrase said that the word meant that the whole cannot be predicted by the parts.

Think outside the box: This phrase has become such a cliche that it itself is in the box thinking. Try "be creative" instead.

At the end of the day, let's increase our transparency, shift our paradigm, get our ducks in a row, and put these hackneyed phrases to bed.

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Today's tip: And let's never forget the immortal words of Kevin Costner as Crash Davis in Bull Durham. Speaking to hotshot pitcher Nuke LaLoosh (Tim Robbins), Crash tells Nuke that the key to interviews in the Big Show is to "Learn your cliches. Study them. Know them. They're your friends. Write this down: 'We gotta play 'em one day at a time.'" Nuke replies, "Boring," and Crash replies, "Of course, that's the point."
 

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