● An endless chain of baffling, jargon-laden e-mails
● Simple, clear, and honest conversations either in person or via a truly collaborative tool
For a long time now, people have denounced the use of buzzwords when plain English would suffice. Yet jargon persists. The critics are helpless against “words” like incent. Beyond that, business folks turn nouns into verbs. In reality, they’re only bloviating. (The now commonplace adoptions of use case15 and price point are real pet peeves of mine.) They fail to consider the context of what they’re saying, and they speak and write with zero regard for their audiences.
Second, you may believe that new times have always required new words and phrases. This is true, but not to the same extent currently exhibited. The verb “to Google” developed organically. Millions of people quickly understood what it meant. But what about horrible and contrived phrases such as Next-Generation Big Data Platform as a Service? Can we honestly make the same case here?
If technology were a fleeting trend, then perhaps we could excuse the growing use of jargon, the e-mail deluge, and bad business communication in general. Unfortunately, it isn’t and we can’t. Technology is permeating every instance of our lives – and not just in the workplace. The Internet of Things is arriving as we speak. Every company is becoming a tech company; some of them just haven’t realized it yet. Few employees work in tech-free zones.
From Pencils to WhatsApp: A Little History Lesson
I’m no Renaissance man, but I fancy myself a student of history, particularly with respect to technology and language.16 The creative use and misuse of language predates the modern-day corporation by centuries. It is anything but a new phenomenon, and neither is our complicated relationship between communication and technology.
Think about gadgets such as the computer, the smartphone, the Kindle, and the iPad. Compare them with the clay tablet, the printing press, the pencil, the telegraph, the typewriter, and other critical innovations from previous centuries. The former contain much more sophisticated technology than the latter, but the two groups have more in common than many people realize. Every one of these tools has faced highly influential detractors.
Dennis Baron makes this point in his impeccably researched 2009 book A Better Pencil: Readers, Writers, and the Digital Revolution. Baron examines the craft of writing via a fascinating historical lens. As he writes:
The World Wide Web wasn’t the first innovation in communication to draw some initial skepticism. Writing itself was the target of one early critic. Plato warned that writing would weaken memory, but he was more concerned that written words – mere shadows of speech – couldn’t adequately represent meaning. His objections paled as more and more people began to structure their lives around handwritten documents. Centuries later, the innovative output of Gutenberg’s printing press was faulted for disrupting the natural, almost spiritual connection between the writer and the page. Eventually, we got used to printing, but Henry David Thoreau scorned the telegraph when it was invented in 1840s because this technology for quickly transporting words across vast distances was useless for people who had nothing to say to one another. The typewriter wasn’t universally embraced as a writing tool when it appeared in the 1870s because its texts were impersonal, it weakened handwriting skills, and it made too much noise. And computers, now the writer’s tool of choice, are still blamed by skeptics for a variety of ills, including destroying the English language, slowing down the writing process, speeding up writing to the point of recklessness, complicating it, trivializing it, and encouraging people to write who may, as Thoreau might put it, have nothing to say.
I hope to avoid the latter criticism in this book.
It turns out that, at least conceptually, writing with a pencil has a great deal in common with texting on a smartphone. Each has profound effects on how people process information and how they communicate with one another.
Book Overview and Outline
I like to think that business books, like their fictional counterparts, take their readers on a journey of sorts. If that’s true, then it makes sense to provide a map. This section answers the following questions:
● Who should go?
● Do I need to bring anything?
● Where are we going?
● How will we get there?
● Who will benefit the most from this trip?
● What can I expect to learn along the way?
The central premise of Message Not Received is quite simple and can be stated in six words:
Most business communication simply doesn’t work.
Because of raging technological change, the need to send clear, effective messages has never been more pronounced. All else being equal, the organizations and individuals that communicate well will do better than those that don’t.
Fair enough, but how do we achieve this laudable goal? How do we maximize the chances that our professional messages are truly received and understood? At a high level, we must do two things. First, as a general rule, we need to use simpler language in our business communications as much as possible. Second, we need to wean ourselves from our e-mail modus operandi and related addiction. In its place, we need to adopt new, truly collaborative tools where appropriate.
This last part is just as crucial as the first. I am no anarchist. Message Not Received does not advocate an Edward Snowden–like approach to business communications. Some things ought to remain private, although the line between the two is shifting. Embracing transparency and communities – or ecosystems, if you like – may confer major potential benefits. Recent events demonstrate the outright trendiness of sharing and more open business practices. For example, consider Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla, a manufacturer of high-performance electric sports cars. In June 2014, Musk announced a “patent pledge” on his company’s blog making his company’s intellectual property (IP) freely available.17 Tesla will not initiate lawsuits against anyone who “in good faith” wants to use its technology to develop electric vehicles. In Musk’s view, the benefits of such a risky gambit exceeded their costs.
The announcement was certainly newsworthy, but Musk is hardly the only chief executive singing that tune these days. Chris Anderson is the former Wired editor-in-chief, a best-selling author, and the current head of DIYDrones. Anderson believes that “community-driven companies will always win.”18 His company is pioneering tremendous innovation via open-source hardware. For his part, WordPress CEO Matt Mullenweg describes betting on the community as “the difference between long-term thinking and short-term thinking.”
By espousing transparency and platform thinking, Musk, Anderson, Mullenweg, and hundreds of other CEOs are effectively betting that their companies will ultimately gain more than they surrender. Silly is the organization, however, that arbitrarily posts highly sensitive documents for all to see. Examples include IP, financial statements (if the company is privately held), proprietary software code, and employee performance reviews, salaries, and succession plans. Discretion, tact, privacy, and basic common sense still matter and always will. Some things have remained constant.
At the same time, many things have changed. In a nutshell, it’s high time for many organizations and people to reevaluate their internal and external business communications. Aside from avoiding buzzwords and confusing language, Message Not Received argues that e-mail should not represent the default or sole means of sending messages and exchanging information.