What we have here is a failure to communicate
By Ben Kauffman, Globe Correspondent, 1/4/04
There is a virus rampant in the business world that has slowly infected our lives outside of the office. It's not an e-mail worm this time. It's not a Microsoft bug. It's not spam. It's the babble we all use in our attempts to communicate with each other.
Or, to put it in a language we all think we understand: In our rush to ramp up our skill sets and partner with new media companies for value-added, win-win business solutions that leverage our knowledge base to maximize customer take-away, we've forgotten how to explain ourselves clearly and concisely.
In his essay ''Politics and the English Language,'' George Orwell argues convincingly that sloppy language allows us to have foolish thoughts. And we use sloppy language and have foolish thoughts now more than ever in the business world. Further, we propagate both.
The fact is, we have come to accept the obscure muddle of business-speak, and in doing so, we accept mediocrity itself. I'm not talking about poor spelling and grammar - though they're certainly not beside the point - I'm talking about our favorite adjective-turned-noun: content.
The folks in Marketing like to call it verbiage - that is, when they're not mispronouncing it ''verbage.'' Ironically, verbiage is the perfect description of what too many of us are guilty of in the workplace. It doesn't simply mean ''content,'' as most assume; it means ''a profusion of words usually of little or obscure content.'' Yes, we do love our verbiage. We use pre-fab word bundles where one word will do. We say job function instead of ''job,'' or top-line growth instead of ''sales.''
As comedian George Carlin says, ''People add extra words when they want to sound more important than they really are.''
Words or phrases become cliched through their use and misuse. But many of the buzzwords we use every day mean little to begin with. In its mission statement, one well-respected new media company bills itself as a ''digital solutions provider that helps organizations generate competitive value by leveraging the power of technology.'' Sure, it sounds good, but what is it they actually do?
This corporate doublespeak turns adjectives into nouns, nouns into verbs, verbs into nouns, and humans into resources - all of which slowly converts our workplace into the cartoon world of ''Dilbert,'' and fills business meetings with the sweet nothings of executing on our strategy and bringing critical mass to our efforts. But the yes-men create value by yes-ing, and generally keep their jobs by simply regurgitating whatever text fills the latest PowerPoint slides, and the cycle repeats itself.
Much of our failure to communicate is the fault of consulting groups, who feed us their own rich sub-genre of euphemisms such as sub-optimal and developmental opportunities to downplay corporate inadequacies. At the software company for which I work, my coworkers were not recently laid off; they were affected by the RIF - reduction in force (pronounced ''riff''). There was also a bit of global sourcing (read: sending American jobs overseas for a fraction of the cost). But not to worry. This will all, it is said, help us become more agile in the marketplace. (Thank goodness!)
My argument is bigger than semantic nitpicking. I have taught enough college literature to know that, and I know that Orwell's ''1984'' illustrates the fact that for great ideas to exist, we need precise language with which to express those ideas. And too many know-nothing managers and VPs have yes-ed themselves into positions as the overmatched CEOs of today. Part of the reason many companies are tanking is that so many foolish thinkers hold positions of power. While high economic times allow poor management to hide behind the smokescreen of verbiage, difficult times do not.
Case in point: George W. Bush - our first MBA president. Let's face it, he has some of the best consultants and spin meisters in the world working for him. It was Bush's well-spun jargon on the heels of the dot-com boom that made him sound credible to much of the American public last election. Needless to say, those same folks are now forced to wonder if there ever really was any ''compassion'' in Bush's conservatism, and whether we will find enough palpable ''evil'' in Iraq to outweigh the continuing loss of American lives.
This is not to single out President Bush. There are enough politicians on both sides of the aisle who play fast and loose with the English language that we would all be well-advised to mind the flashy but nonsensical sound bites this election season. Unexamined, they will only serve to reward and further mediocrity - and what a waste, in a country founded on revolutionary thinking and the clarity of a few strongly worded documents.
We should not feel so threatened by such concise language, at work and at home, nor by novel ideas, by smart people. We need to hold accountable our managers, our VPs, our CEOs, when they start tossing around rhetorical cotton candy. I'm sure they have more to offer than they're currently able to express.
For that matter, we could all be a bit smarter and more creative, and certainly more intelligible, if we were not so apathetically liaising with our colleagues and having, as one might say, important discussions about topics in regard to which we're speaking.
But not to worry: a consultant friend of mine assures me that though our situation may appear sub-optimal, ultimately, it presents us all with tremendous developmental opportunities.
Ben Kauffman works as a technical editor and is a freelance writer. He can be reached at bpk411@etuit.com
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