I see Hutchinson and raise him. Pervasive technobabble is not confined to billion-dollar corporations and the people who work for them. Troll around the Web for a few minutes. You’ll find no shortage of much smaller companies that describe their products and services in oblique manners. And this isn’t just a sales or marketing problem. Ask many knowledge workers what they do, and you may very well need a site like AcronymFinder or AcronymSearch to translate. Myriad e-mails, internal corporate memos, press releases, and blog posts bastardize business and technology terms, not to mention seemingly a good deal of marketing copy on the Web. You might not even have to surf the Web. Think about your last few company meetings and the messages piling up in your inbox. I’ll bet that you can find an example or two of poor communication.
What are the effects of this incessant noise? In a nutshell, they’re not positive. For now, suffice it to say that intended audiences either completely tune out or don’t (fully) receive the message, much less understand it.
As a general rule, the quality and clarity of business communication have deteriorated considerably over the past 10 years. Many people have lost the ability to communicate clearly (read: without business jargon). And, by relying far too much on one medium (e-mail), we muddy our messages even further.
Yes, we live in very busy and noisy times. Ours is an era marked by unprecedented technological change. Fortunately, there is good news on two levels. First, in this chaos lies enormous opportunity. The demand for simple and clear communication far exceeds its supply. Many us have forgotten that good things are more likely to happen when others actually understand our messages. (For example, imagine that you are a salesperson and your competitors speak technobabble. You are the one who speaks plain English.)
Second, we all can learn how to communicate better. Fret not; it is well within our grasp. It just requires a fundamental shift in what we say and how we say it.
PART I
WORLDS ARE COLLIDING
Part I begins by sketching out the roadmap for the book. It then turns to the tsunami of technology that is rapidly engulfing our lives. It examines the profound ways in which the business world is changing. Thanks to near-constant connectivity and ubiquitous technology, employees are becoming overwhelmed.
It includes the following chapters:
● Introduction: The Intersection of Business, Language, Communication, and Technology
● Chapter 1: Technology Is Eating the World: The Dizzying Nature of Today’s Existence
● Chapter 2: The Increasingly Overwhelmed Employee: Is This Becoming the New Normal?
Introduction
The Intersection of Business, Language, Communication, and Technology
The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.
Although he died in 1950, Shaw’s words live on, especially in the business world. Far too many executives, salespeople, consultants, and even rank-and-file employees just don’t communicate very well.
No doubt, you know the type. Some think that they’re speaking and writing effectively when they drop ostensibly sophisticated terms such as paradigm shift, synergy, net-net, low-hanging fruit, and optics.13 These folks regularly rely on obscure acronyms, technobabble, jargon, and buzzwords when plain English would suffice. They constantly invent new tech-laden words, bastardize others, and turn nouns into verbs. They ignore their audiences, oblivious to the context of what they say and write. In other words, they “talk without speaking,” to paraphrase a popular U2 song.
Forget for a moment a software vendor’s poorly worded press release and an incoming CEO’s cringe-worthy memo about “strategic synergies and alignments.” There’s an underlying question here: Is such jargon necessary? In other words, are today’s business and technology environments so different and complicated that they require the use of an entirely new, usually confusing vocabulary?
For the most part the answer is no. At a high level, a good communicator should be able to explain confusing topics to teenagers without getting all technical. I have done so on several occasions. It’s really not that hard. Just remember one thing:
At its most basic level, the word communicate means “to make common.”14
Subject: The Other Scourge of Business Communication
Bad business communication is a disease with significant costs and far-reaching implications. The prevalence of hackneyed and utterly meaningless terms, however, is just one of its causes.
Let’s say that I could wave my magic wand and single-handedly eliminate the use of jargon and confusing language in every organization in the world. No longer would you hear your manager say things like, “Let’s take this offline, review our learnings, engage in some blue-sky thinking, and then circle back.” Poof! Value-adds and paradigm shifts have been vanquished forever. Grammarians and English teachers around the world would rejoice in the streets.
Would this solve the business communication problem? Although we’d be off to a good start, the answer is no. Even the Orwellian abolishment of buzzwords would not guarantee that our colleagues, partners, bosses, underlings, clients, and prospects would effectively receive and understand our messages. A multitude of misses (miscommunications, misapprehensions, misunderstandings, and mistakes) would still result. How? From the way in which we overwhelmingly choose to send our messages.
Yes, I’m talking about the first killer app of the Internet, our widely preferred communications medium: e-mail. Many corporate folks depend almost exclusively on it as a ubiquitous communications tool. They pepper their staff, colleagues, prospects, and clients with torrents of messages. In the process, they actively resist new, user-friendly, affordable, powerful, and truly collaborative tools specifically designed to make people work, collaborate, and communicate better. (Chapter 8 introduces several exciting and progressive organizations that have adopted these new applications.)
Technology and the Cardinal Importance of Business Communication
In a way, nothing has changed. Business has always revolved around communication, and some people have always been better than others at writing and speaking. No one expects the squirrelly IT guy to be as debonair as the CEO or the head of sales or marketing. Not everyone can be Dale Carnegie. We expect different things from different people at work. We accept the fact that management consultants, techies, software salespeople, and chief execs may communicate in oblique manners. This holds true irrespective of the medium: writing a quick e-mail, penning a company-wide announcement, addressing thousands of people, or speaking individually to a colleague in person. For a long time now, the inability to communicate effectively has inhibited many organizations and derailed individual careers. We have always taken certain people with 50-pound bags of salt. Ignoring or tuning out blowhards may stop an oncoming migraine, but it’s hardly a good solution to the problem, much less the ideal one.
In another way, everything has changed. Never before has the business world moved as fast as it does today – a trend that will only intensify for the foreseeable future. This is particularly true on technology-related matters. The need for clear and effective communication is more essential than ever. Not only will this problem persist if we ignore it, but it will exacerbate.
What’s the Big Whoop?
You may think that relying on jargon and excessive e-mails is just par for the course. What’s the big deal,