As a business news journalist, I read lots of press releases from companies. Virtually every one these days is infected with the gobbledygook of business jargon.
Even in the most banal of announcements, it seems every company is moving the needle, employing best practices or creating some new paradigm. And the best companies? They’re playing chess while the others play checkers.
This noxious disease has long been with us. Maybe 25 years or so ago, it became fashionable for companies not to sell products or services but to peddle “solutions.” That was about the same time executives trumpeted that they were going to “grow this company,” as if it were a beefsteak tomato plant.
But it seems to have metastasized lately. Now we’ve got tiger teams and empowered groups. I’m not sure exactly what they do, but they spend a good deal of time getting buy-in. And they get it not from employees but from associates. Nobody is loyal or committed anymore; instead, they give 110 percent. I guess it’s all part of being a game-changer. At the end of the day.
Sports jargon is bad enough. The worst part of sports clichés is that they make no sense. I’ve always been confused why a slumping player needs to get “untracked” when it seems excruciatingly clear he needs to get “on track.” Nor do I understand exactly how a football player makes moves “in space.” Or how a baseball player hits “safely” in five straight games. Some of those line drives look dangerous to me.
Business jargon makes sense, at least. But it is more prolific. Look at a typical business announcement, and you’ll read about systems that are scalable, ideas that are out-of-the-box or verticals that have synergy with a company’s core competencies. And the business will proudly tell you about its bleeding-edge proposal that sprung from its dashboard metrics. It’s all just an outgrowth of its innovative ecosystem.
Wait. I spoke too soon. I have no idea what much of that means.
Hacking through the thickets of mindless verbiage is just part of a business journalist’s job. But please, dear God, don’t make me read one more reference to some CEO opening his kimono. That’s a disturbing image. Or, to employ today’s business jargon: That’s bad optics.
Forbes magazine online recently had a contest, of sorts. They put two business clichés side by side, and readers voted on the most annoying one. So “corporate values” went up against “make hay,” for example. The winner – or loser – went on to face the next obnoxious phrase, such as “burning platform” or “swim lane.”
The goal, explained Forbes: “To identify the single most annoying example of business jargon and thoroughly embarrass all who employ it and any of these other ridiculous expressions.”
The winner? “Drinking the Kool-Aid.” It beat “leverage” as the most vilified.
Those terms are groaners, to be sure. But my vote for the single most annoying bit of business jargon: “It is what it is.”
Every time I come across that phrase, it sparks some philosophical neuron and makes me stop and wonder how it could possibly be otherwise. I mean, is it plausible that something can be what it is not? Is there an alternative reality in which the state of being is somehow upended? Or is there only one true reality in which things are, in fact, what they are? If so, then why would an educated person say “It is what it is,” an expression that overstates an obvious and immutable condition?
Anyway, I can waste a fair bit of otherwise productive time pondering that phrase, which makes it particularly detestable.
Here’s a suggestion for those of you who write, or are quoted in, press releases and other business announcements: Don’t use business jargon. By eschewing such bromides, it will force you to write and think in a clearer, more honest manner. And your readers will be grateful; they’ll find your announcements refreshing and easier to understand. You may achieve real communication.
Hey, you know what that is? That’s a win-win.
Charles Crumpley is editor of the Business Journal. He can be reached at [email protected].