Why people speak like idiots

Supply chain integrity delivered by McKesson products and services ensures safe drugs and medical supplies for patients at the most efficient cost. A recent study by the Healthcare Distribution Management Association identified the important value provided by pharmaceutical wholesalers on behalf of both manufacturers and customers through superb delivery logistics, working capital savings and phenomenal operating efficiencies combined with innovative valueadding services.

— McKesson Annual Report 2004

Bull has become the official language of business. In every meeting, in every memo, in every PowerPoint we are drowning in a flood of jargon, acronyms and $2 words that become harder to decipher with every passing day. Take the paragraph above. It’s one long, excessive romp through the ancient forest of Obscurity. It’s not hard to imagine the writer turning blue in his effort to get the words out of his pen. And yet, if you met the guy (or girl), you’d probably think, “smart guy, we could use him on our annual report.”

So why do otherwise normal people turn out such crippling prose? The question must have occurred to Robert Frost, when he wrote: “The brain is a wonderful organ; it starts working the moment you get up in the morning and does not stop until you get into the office.”

The same question occurred to Brian Fugere, Chelsea Hardaway and Jon Warshawsky who have penned a new book Why Business People Speak Like Idiots. The title alone tempted the FitzMartin book club to pick this book for our May get-together. The three authors make a number of points that we’ve been preaching for years.

Impressive is as impressive does

The right word at the right time can make you sound so smart. So in business we inject our work with metric tons of impressive sounding words in the hopes that people will think we’re geniuses. We have a term for this: mutual mystification. Forget being clear. If you don’t understand me, I’m bound to seem smarter, right?

Serpentine!

It’s hard to hit a moving target. Business-speak reeks of fear. People are afraid to commit, afraid to own an opinion. The corporate machine has a way of grinding the edges off of anything that could possibly offend even a single human. And people are rightly afraid to be pegged with an opinion that is destined to upset a Lithuanian cattle rancher in Montana. The next time you are forced to sit through a 67-slide PowerPoint on the latest corporate strategy, count the number of definitives. You won’t need but a few fingers.

“Buy Now, Dangit!”

The Hard-Sell breeds business-speak as well. We stuff our sales pitches, our brochures, our websites with so much hype and pressure it’s no wonder the average person has become immune to the tactic. In fact, people can detect the Hard-Sell like a bloodhound on a fox, and at the first “best-in-class value-added solution” they tune out. It’s a skill we’ve all evolved after years of exposure to hypus overthetopus.

It’s worse than you think

The bad news for those fluent in business-speak is this: it does the exact opposite of what we intend. We want to sound smart but all the jargon and fancy-pants fluff actually makes us seem insecure. We want to reassure our audience, but the hype and evasion create doubt. People simply don’t believe what we are saying. Because the language is now built into our corporate culture, it’s hard to break the cycle.

But there is hope

For the brave souls who reject the language of business and instead choose to be clear, the rewards are great. And it’s not that hard to do. Start small. Small words tell great thoughts. Use short sentences. Stick to nouns and verbs. One good verb is worth a mountain of adjectives. In fact, the next time you write a memo, go back and edit out every adjective. You’ll find that only a handful are essential to your point. After that, look at the verbs you’ve chosen. If your memo needs color, add it with good verbs, action verbs. Stick to the active voice. The passive voice is weak and typically wordy. It leaves the reader wondering who did what. Do these simple things and you’ll sound smarter and people will understand what you are trying to say.

One last thought on speaking clearly and saying what you mean. The battle of Gettysburg was one of the most brutal fights in the history of the United States. More than 45,000 soldiers died in just a few days. To mark the importance of the moment, the government chose to make a monument of the cemetery. The first speaker at the event — Edward Everett — spoke for almost two hours, inflicting a 13,500-word oration on the world. Read the speech - if you dare.

The next speaker, not noted at the time for his eloquence, spoke 270 words and not one had five syllables. I’ll leave its value to your judgment:

Four score and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this. But in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion; that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain; that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom; and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

Abraham Lincoln, November 19, 1863
Gettysburg, Pennsylvania