© 2007–2010 on original material. For permissions info, contact BK.
Note: This piece was originally published in The Boston Globe, in slightly different form.
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 great 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 George Carlin said, ''People add extra words when they want to sound more important than they really are.''
Words or phrases become clichéd through their use and misuse. But many of the buzzwords we use every day mean little to begin with. One well-respected new media company has since become more exacting, but in an earlier published incarnation of their mission statement, billed themselves 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 such a company does?
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. Coworkers are never laid off; they are affected by a reduction in force, as a result of global sourcing (read: sending American jobs to India, China, etc.) or synergies (read: redundancies) due to acquisitions. Not to worry — layoffs help us become more agile in the marketplace.
My argument is bigger than semantic nitpicking. I taught college lit long enough to 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. Face it, he had some of the best consultants and spin-meisters in the world working for him, and his well-spun jargon on the heels of the dot-com boom made him sound credible to nearly half of American voters back in the fall of 2000. Needless to say, those same folks eventually began to wonder when we were going to see any of the purported "compassion" in Bush's conservatism, and whether we would ever find enough palpable "evil" in Iraq to outweigh the continuing loss of American lives.
This is not to single out President Bush — though he deserves it — as there are plenty of politicos 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 Mr. Bush the younger 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.
So we've got that going for us....
Introduction
Open with a joke followed by a mixed sports metaphor. If you can do both at the same time, you'll be batting a thousand right out of the gate!
(Note: Exclamation points are generally for admins and the folks in MarCom. But what the heck, break the rules occasionally!)
PowerPoint
Always use PowerPoint. It's the greatest tool of all time for prolonging a meeting. And nothing is more business-y than a good long self-important meeting. PowerPoint enables you to project your notes onto a big screen so you can then read them verbatim to attendees. It allows you to waste time, money, and create 1970s-style "fly-in" animation at the same time you're wasting time and money. (How's that for synergy!?) So do it. Baffle them with bullshit. Above all, remember, nothing generates buzz like buzzwords.
Buzzwords
Repeat whichever buzzwords and acronyms you've heard in the latest meeting, especially from those one to two levels above you. When possible, try to be wordy (remember: four words good, two words bad) without actually being substantive. In lieu of content, use clichés, big words, and jargon. If you don't know any jargon, make up an acronym.
Acronyms
Everyone loves acronyms. From CEOs to CIOs and CMOs, all the way down the line to VPs. Also, there are some terrific jargon-generators out here if you know where to look. When you are forced to be substantive, be obtuse, and tell folks what they already know. People love re-learning what they already know. It makes them feel smart.
Bullet Lists
At around this point in any newsletter article or presentation, you'll want to include some bullet points:
There's No "i" in Team
Agree with your boss. They like that. And when your boss asks you to do something, turn around and assign the task to your subordinates. It'll make them feel special, and show your boss what a good designator you are. Designator is a new word. It's like decider.
Troubleshooting
If you're ever asked a question that requires actual thought, have a mental list of go-to words that you feel comfortable with: strategy, function, and execute are great ones to start with. You'll want words that are pretty much interchangeable and can be used to mean anything in any situation. Use them as needed. (Note: They can be especially effective in conjunction with one another.)
Conclusion
So get out there in 2008 and be all you can be — drive the car you aspire to be able to afford. Remember, everyone loves you — especially your boss's assistant. (You could run this whole shebang if you had an assistant like that.) So ramp up your game a notch, execute on strategy, and generate competitive value by leveraging technology to maximize customer take-away.
That said, I'd hate to leave you without an invaluable take-away. So here it is — the PowerPoint presentation....
Two years ago, a co-worker brought me a draft of a letter to the Senior VPs of the large corporation for which we work in the cubicled salt mines. The letter was a plea for the cause of energy conservation within the company. We’re a multinational Silicon Valley software company of roughly 5,000; surely, we could be doing something — anything — to green up.
We cranked
out a final copy of the letter and began asking colleagues to co-sign
with us. It felt somewhat revolutionary (Sure, we work for The Man, and sure, he checks our email and peeks in
our web browsing, but we're free-thinking individuals, dammit, not
mindless proles...); we were earnest and enthusiastic and
ready to take on the big guns with our well-honed rhetoric.
Thankfully, before we dashed off the letter to corporate, the local facilities manager — a seasoned DC lobbyist, and all for our cause — asked us to reconsider our actions. Somewhat chastened at first, we did, and instead wisely decided to form a small task force to see what we could do locally, with the long-range plan of using our presumed success as a proof of concept to sell the conservation argument up the ladder to corporate.
Even as I get older and — ahem — more respectable, it bores me to do things slowly and methodically, but ultimately, we made the right choice. Sure, I'd love to see change happen through punk rock, bold art, and strong words, but change doesn't happen overnight, and no one likes to be shown up — especially those with initials in their job titles — and the letter, signed by 50 employees might have seemed a bit mutinous to our paycheck-endorsers. Sometimes, it’s simply not necessary to fight corporate city hall loudly, as morally empowering as it might feel at the time. In fact, if we had, we might have more easily forgotten our cause after getting a lip service response. Instead, we now have a hugely successful locally-grown initiative that is indeed the model of conservation we’d hoped for.
Thanks to buy-in from the site manager, and local facilities, IT, and business unit group heads, as well as excellent employee support, the initiative within months reached our initial goal of reducing the amount of electricity our site uses by 100,000 kilowatt hours (kW h), annualized, and we have since saved another 50,000 kW h per year.
At our site
of approximately 300 employees, computers outnumber people nearly five to one, so clearly there was some (as the suits like to say) “low-hanging fruit” to be
had. Thus, our biggest gains have been made not by changing expensive building
systems like HV/AC, but by improving inefficiencies in our computing
operations. We’ve given away unused equipment, shut down rarely-used equipment, set machines to power-savings mode, and asked fellow employees to forgo
power-draining "screen savers" (that’s right, kids, it takes a lot of CPU power to draw those pretty multicolor 3D pipe
designs and such)
in favor of turning off their
monitors when they leave for the night. Electricity rates vary, so cost savings
are somewhat tough to estimate (certainly over $20,000 per year though), but in
terms of usage, our simple housekeeping measures have so far
conserved enough energy to power 18 average New England homes, yearly.
What’s more, we haven’t spent any corporate funds to achieve our substantial savings. We even convinced our vending machine contractor to install on our soda machines energy miser sensors, which power up a machine only when they detect motion (i.e., a customer), while maintaining beverage temperature as necessary.
In addition,
we’ve greatly changed the way that we use the computing power we do have — not
only centralizing data storage on robust servers, but sharing their processing
power as well. We then access those servers not with power-hungry tower-style
computers, but with laptops which, on the average, use one-quarter the power of
most bigger, desktop CPUs.
We’ve continued to maintain, not increase, our energy usage, and to share information with other sites and encourage them to set up similar local initiatives, and have slowly — and successfully — been pushing energy awareness and savings up the chain of command. We’ve even been cited positively by corporate executive staff, when asked what we as a company are doing to green up.
Not bad for a few local folks with a chip on their collective shoulder and a hopeful eye toward change. Our grass-roots solution demanded that we change first — not simply talk the talk of revolution — and it ultimately proved far more effective than our initial demand for that same change in corporate. Our well-written and thoughtful letter to corporate would have been, essentially, an op-ed piece without a newspaper to print it and only a very small audience to read it.
The tendency in most large corporations is toward apathy and wastefulness, but it needn’t be. Sure, we’re all more thrifty at home than at work, but what a simple thing it is to turn off the lights when you're done in the copy room, or to police up computers left on in empty cubes. It’s no skin off my nose, and though I’d rather see executive pay come back in line with say, reality, wastefulness breeds more wastefulness, and it’d be nice if the suits had fewer excuses when it’s time for raises to be handed down to those of us toiling in the mines.
