Jargon is worn like a flashy label, by the people the least sure they belong. Why the clearest bosses reach for the smallest possible words.
Bridges, corridors, gateways, nodes, clusters, springboards, launchpads, powerhouses. Paradigms, verticals, deep dives, deliverables, headwinds, synergies. I could go on (and on), but you no doubt get the idea. The list of corporate buzzwords used to signal new and innovative thinking is endless, a stream of consciousness that in fact offers very little real insight and almost always poses far more questions than it answers. It’s a word soup, a concoction of random ingredients that offer no context and mean nothing, and yet the business world laps it all up, few being brave enough to call out the bullshit.
What makes things worse is that the best and most successful corporate communication has always been the exact opposite, beautiful in its clarity and its simplicity. And yet by and large the corporate world ignores that fact. It’s as though nobody wants to be the first to stand up and say that the emperor is not, in fact, wearing any clothes. Part of the reason for this, perhaps, is the adoption of English as the international language of business. Non-native speakers love to use English words that sound smart and clever, not knowing (or perhaps ignoring) the fact that the smartest person in the room usually speaks in the most simple language. It’s easy to make something simple sound rather complicated, far more difficult to make a complicated idea sound simple.
Nor is it a phenomenon solely restricted to the business world. Academia, it would appear, is full of it. Back in 2020, Adam Galinsky, a professor at Columbia Business School published a study that looked at 64,000 dissertation titles and found that graduates of lower-ranked universities reached for jargon far more often than those at more prestigious institutions. “We use jargon when we’re feeling insecure,” Galinsky says. Buzzwords, it seems, are a lot like designer labels: all too often worn by those least certain they belong in the room.
It’s ironic then that the same jargon which is supposed to make you look clever quite often does not. Daniel Oppenheimer, then at Princeton, ran five experiments in 2006 and found that readers judged the authors of needlessly complicated prose to be less intelligent, not more. Dress a plain point in long words and you come across as the dimmer party at the dinner party. Turns out the smartest person in the room is usually the one speaking plainly.
Occasionally, the most awful people can say the most relevant things. In May 2010, Elon Musk (back then seen in a more favourable light) sent a company-wide email to staff at SpaceX with the subject, ‘Acronyms Seriously Suck’, complaining that invented initialisms were a barrier to clear communication but that nobody was courageous enough to say so, instead preferring to sit through meetings looking confused rather than foolish. Musk is not everyone’s cup of tea (certainly not this correspondent’s), but on this he was right, all but describing Galinsky’s insecurity conundrum a decade before the professor himself had codified it.
Not that Musk was the first. One of the best corporate communicators of recent times, the investor Warren Buffett, wrote (back in 1998) the preface to the American regulator’s Plain English Handbook, and offered a most useful tip, that being to write for one real reader. When drafting his investment firm Berkshire Hathaway’s annual letter, Buffett always imagined that he was explaining things to his two sisters. Stuck for a reader of your own, he suggested, borrow his: begin ‘Dear Doris and Bertie’ and go on from there. Buffett did, and nobody ever thought he was anything less than the cleverest person in the room.
The bullshit machine continues working apace, alas. Listen to pitches at start-up events, investment promotion conferences, even internal meetings and the language of the day persists, all gateways, bridges, hubs, springboards, every word carefully picked to sound impressive and (ideally) smart, but often not saying anything at all. Next time you have a chance to speak, do the opposite. Say what you actually mean and say it in the most simple way possible. The evidence suggests that people will think you all the cleverer for it. Credibility comes from evidence, not language. The emperor, after all, was never wearing anything in the first place. Somebody just had to be the first to say so.
Photo: Dreamstime.