To get a real feel for the language we use in business, try the same phrases at home. See whether the children feel their trip to the theme park offers an “enhanced customer experience”. Explain to your spouse that a chocolate bar can be “a great tasting confectionery treat within the context of a nutritionally balanced diet”. Watch how the family reacts as you lead the discussion about the coming year: “going forward, we shall focus on cost control.”
Isn’t it funny how phrases that rise so readily to our lips in business sound so crass to family members who demand that words have real meanings? That is because too much of what we say in business merely glosses, obfuscates or fills the gap between one banal point and another.
The Financial Times writer Lucy Kellaway works tirelessly to log new offenses against language committed in the name of business. Her splendid efforts fail to prevent the recycling of older dross. Does it matter? If we know what we mean, if the analysts understand the point and employees get the drift, where’s the harm?
Well to start with, we and the analysts and the staff don’t necessarily grasp the point. Just as important, there is a wider audience, one that is beginning to have doubts about the benefits of unalloyed capitalism. This language is not straight talking – and business needs to talk straight right now.
You don’t believe it annoys? Then listen to what people say about the evasions they hear from prominent men and women interviewed on the television and radio. Read the irritated letters they write to newspapers, decrying the decline in clear English. That most anger is aimed at politicians should give little comfort to businessmen and women who use the same words.
What people want is the truth, clearly told. They want it even more now they feel that business has concealed, confused and lied. And they want it in a language they understand, in words they use themselves, uttered by people who live in the same world. Then they might – might – feel inclined to believe what they are told and to renew their faith in business.
When did we stop talking clearly? Most businesses are variants of a simple proposition: to make a better product and sell it to more customers. Why do we wrap this in so many pointless words?
I think there are three reasons. The first is a hankering for a technical vocabulary, beloved of all professions and exemplified by the arcane language of the law and medicine.