Michael's post today on business-speak (that's "BS" for short) is especially timely. The upcoming book, Why Business People Speak Like Idiots, made our December Fast Forward list of 101 ideas, people and trends that will shape the biz world this year. Part humor, part service, WBPSLI is brought to us by three former Deloitte Consulting execs and hits shelves in about six weeks. Here are four quick points on how to be a straight shooter, cribbed from Amazon.com's preview.
- The Obscurity Trap: "After extensive analysis of the economic factors facing our industry, we have concluded that a restructuring is essential to maintaining competitive position. A task force has been assembled..." These are the empty calories of business communication. And, unfortunately, they're the rule. The Obscurity Trap catches idiots desperate to sound smart or prove their purpose, and lures them with message-killers like jargon, long-windedness, acronyms, and evasiveness.
- The Anonymity Trap: Businesses love clones--easy to hire, easy to manage, easy to train, easy to replace--and almost everyone is all too happy to oblige. We outsource our voice through templates, speechwriters and email, and cave in to conventions that aren't really even rules.
- The Hard-Sell Trap: Legions of business people fall prey to the Hard-Sell Trap. We overpromise. We accentuate the positive and pretend the negative doesn't exist. This may work for those pushing Ginsu knives and miracle Abdominizers, but it's dead wrong for persuading business people to listen.
- The Tedium Trap: Everyone you work with thinks about sex, tells stories, gets caught up in life's amazing details, and judges everyone else by the way they look and act. We live to be entertained. We all learned that in Psychology 101, except for the business idiots who must have skipped that semester. They tattoo their long executive-sounding titles on their foreheads, dump pre-packaged numbers on their audience, and virtually guarantee that we want nothing to do with them.
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Recent Comments | 4 Total
January 11, 2005 at 11:26am by dave
I find that this is a phenomenon of age and experience. Younger business people tend to employ it more often. Seasoned business people do not have time and tend to get right to the point.
Of course, you play to your audience...
D
January 11, 2005 at 3:26pm by Steve
I agree with Dave above. It tends to be more the case with younger professionals out to impress as well as with those who never get over that need to impress. Older professionals often feel more comfortable in their skin, so to speak, and have earned the right and wisdom to speak more frankly. It's like a lot elderly people I know; they are far more likely to speak their mind than the "youngsters" around them, even when it's not politically correct to do so. It is also an organizational thing. If a company encourages clear, honest communication and discourages meaningless corporate speak, their employees won't feel the need to use it to impress anyone.
February 22, 2005 at 3:34pm by Meg
It's revenge of the business schools for everyone else having fun while they were doing useless statistics! On the bright side, it makes MBAs so much easier to identify in a crowd, surrounded by other MBAs acting as if they are interested in the conversation, each trying ever harder to impress and pull obscure phrases out of...uh...thin air.
November 30, 2005 at 5:54am by Kolin
I disagree. Older people don't use these terms per se. Not just older business people. The danger therefore is that as the generations progress, we will have to endure more and more people talking this inane babble. Result=greater social alienation for most of us.
Or, as Orwell would have put it, "doubleplusgood duckspeak".