Speaking corporatese does not make one a corporate philosopher
Matthew Stibbe points out this passage from a review of Carly Fiorina’s book, Tough Choices:
Her bigger theme is leadership, and this is where Ms Fiorina fails. Again and again, she interrupts a good narrative with vain and verbose harangues about corporate strategy. From one paragraph to the next, her language becomes wooden and cliched as she descends into meaningless jargon. Things such as “frameworks” are constantly being “leveraged”, usually “proactively” and “going forward”. Like most former chiefs in search of redemption, Ms Fiorina wants to be remembered as a corporate philosopher. She won’t be.
Any sort of jargon is not, in and of itself, a bad thing. Any specialty area will develop its own vocabulary, its own set of terms that have special meanings within that discipline.
But all to often, they’re used to give an aura of importance to rather plain ideas. What does leverage mean, outside of the context of discussing levers, or high finance? Most often, it means little more than “use.” “We’ll leverage our core competencies…” But the polysyllabic (which is just a big word for big word) leverage sounds more impressive, doesn’t it?
As my eldest daughter likes to say, “Um, yeah, no.”
Roy Jacobsen
in Plain Language
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Reader Comments (2)
You can't go wrong by using Plain English, can you?
The point you raise--looking at what you're writing from the reader's point of view--is always the key to being sure you're getting your point across. Thanks for mentioning it.