Writing, Clear and Simple

Have you ever arrived at the office on Monday morning and gotten all excited when you saw the new strategy memo in your inbox? Did you ever sit through a meeting and afterward say “That was the BEST employee benefits presentation I’ve ever been to! Those slides were fantastic!”? Did you ever read a corporate press release laced with words and phrases like “paradigm shift,” “leading edge,” “empower,” and “value proposition,” and understand a word of it?

I didn’t think so.

On the other hand, have you ever been bored to tears by a presentation that included slides you couldn’t read, about a topic you didn’t care about, read by a speaker who was either gushing with phony enthusiasm or seemed like he’d rather be having a root canal? Did you ever get corporate report that you read two or three times, and you still had no idea what it said? Did you ever sit through a meeting pretending to pay attention, while really wondering to yourself "Will they ever shut up?"

That’s what I thought.

Most people can carry on perfectly ordinary and human conversations outside of the office. For some reason, between the hours of 8 a.m. and 5 p.m., they undergo a change. They become incapable of saying or writing something without sounding like some kind of mind-numbed android. It goes by many labels: corporate-speak, jargon, gobbledygook. The book Why Business People Speak Like Idiots uses a well-known (and more descriptive) term for this phenomenon, saying “Bull has become the language of business.”

The authors, Brian Fugere, Chelsea Hardaway and Jon Warshawsky admit to contributing their share of bull—“jargon, empty hype, fact-free updates and dull presentations delivered on autopilot”—during their consulting careers, but became frustrated by the bull, especially when they began to figure out that bull doesn’t work.

So they began a campaign against bull. At first it was subversive: they quit using PowerPoint (gasp!), they stopped using buzz words and jargon and used plain English, they told stories instead of reciting statistics. As they found people actually began paying attention to what they were saying, the got more and more blatant. They started a “Serious Bull” jargon contest, and they developed an application called Bullfighter, which works with Word and PowerPoint. When you click the button on the toolbar, Bullfighter scans your document or slide deck for the meaningless jargon, the “jibba-jabba” (as Mr. T called it). Download it. Install it. Use it. It’s free, and it’s a great way to de-bull your writing.

And now they’ve expanded the Battle of the Bull with their book. Why Business People Speak Like Idiots is a fun, energetic book, with a very clear personality, and that’s one of the things the authors keep coming back to: using your personality, your voice, and your passions to connect with others, rather than falling back on the washed-out, dehumanized, corporate personality and voice (there’s no passion in it) that infects business communication.

If bull is so bad (and I don’t know anyone who’ll dispute that), then why is there so much of it? The authors identify four traps people fall into in business communication.

1. The Obscurity Trap: Here, people who are trying to sound smart, prove their worth, or avoid responsibility throw out long strings of jargon, evasiveness, and acronyms, rather like a squid squirting ink. What does it all mean? I don’t know, but it sounds impressive, doesn’t it? No, not really.
2. The Anonymity Trap: For some reason, corporations tend to stamp out personality. There are a number of reasons for this, including fear of risk, fear of offending someone (aka Political Correctness), fear of liability. Also, it’s easy for businesses to treat their employees the same (same training, same management, same evaluations, same pay). When they do, people start acting the same, using the same templates to produce documents, e-mails, voicemails, and presentations that look and sound the same—boring.
3. The Hard-Sell Trap: This happens when we adapt the approach of the used-car salesman to every message we deliver. That’s when you end up with corporate messages that sound like this: “We deliver best-in-class, value-added solutions that transform global enterprises into market leaders.” Bleagh.
4. The Tedium Trap: We forget how much people love to be entertained, and so drone on and on about the third-quarter earnings report, and how the new strategy will drive more deals during the fourth quarter, and blah-blah-blah. We assume that our message is interesting, rather than beginning with the idea that we have to capture our audience’s attention, to give them a reason to give a rip.

After helping us identifying the traps, the book gives us several chapters describing ways to avoid falling into them. For example, in “You’ve Been Templatized,” they advise avoiding templates, especially PowerPoint templates, to keep out of the Anonymity trap. Templates lead to mass-produced, boring and predictable business communication; they often remove thought from the process of creating content. Another defense against this trap is summarized nicely in the chapter title “Pick Up the Damn Phone.”

Again and again this book encourages us to be authentic, to speak from your heart, to show your human side. In the chapter “The Power of Imperfection,” they tell about when Walter Cronkite announced the death of President Kennedy. When the story was handed to him, he paused for a long moment, reading it to himself. Then he said “From Dallas, Texas, the flash, apparently official. President Kennedy died at 1:00 p.m., Central Standard Time, two o’clock Eastern Standard Time.” He looked at the studio clock and said “Some thirty-eight minutes ago,” and then momentarily lost his composure. He winced, removed his eyeglasses, and cleared his throat before continuing.

That has been called the “most moving and historic” moment in broadcast history and the authors argue that much of its emotional impact came because Cronkite showed his imperfection, his humanity. Much of getting rid of the bull in our speech and writing has to do with exactly that: our willingness to let down our guard, to show that we’re human, and to connect with our audience.

To be sure, bull is a problem in other realms besides business, most notably in academia and politics. The ideas and examples in this book focus on the world of business, but they can be applied almost everywhere the bulls are herding. I highly recommend Why Business People Speak Like Idiots to anyone who’s had enough bull and wants to fight back.

Why Business People Speak like Idiots: A Bullfighter’s Guide