Off the Presses: Why Business People Speak Like Idiots: A Bullfighter's Guide

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From NetSpeed Leader Volume 23, June 2005

“Bull has become the language of business.”

“Anyone can put together a presentation that describes the ‘extensible synergies derived from repurposing intellectual assets.’ It takes more work to express the idea (no, we don’t know what it is) in plain English.”

Have you ever been mystified by jargon? Put off by an evasive report? Lulled to sleep by the memo equivalent of a DeMille epic? Filled with horrid examples, irreverent commentary, and great ideas for simplifying language, Why Business People Speak Like Idiots is the cure for the common run-on sentence.

Throughout the book, authors Brian Fugere, Chelsea Hardaway, and Jon Warshawsky—who are also responsible for the Clio Award-winning Bullfighter software—identify corporate speak as the numbing down of American business. And the message goes deeper than just language. They define four traps that lure us into believing that corporate speak is the best way to communicate, and more importantly, they identify these traps as symptoms of what’s ailing corporate America.

The Obscurity Trap
“These are the empty calories of business communication. And, unfortunately, they’re the rule. The Obscurity Trap catches idiots desperate to sound smart or prove their purpose, and lure them with message-killers like jargon, long-windedness, acronyms, and evasiveness. The one who escape do so through plain language and candor.”

The Anonymity Trap
“Businesses love clones—they’re easy to hire, easy to manage, easy to train, easy to replace—and almost everyone is all too happy to oblige. We outsource our voice through templates, speechwriters, and e-mail, and cave in to conventions that aren’t really even rules. What business idiots have forgotten is that your personality is the thing that helped you make friends, find a date, get a mate, and probably even get a job.”

The Hard-Sell Trap
“We overpromise. We accentuate the positive and pretend the negative doesn’t exist—not because we received our business training on used-car lots, but because we’re human, and we like to be optimistic. The result is that we do too much hard selling…dead wrong for persuading (sober) business people to listen. At the end of the day, people hate to be sold to, but they love to buy.”

The Tedium Trap
“We live to be entertained. We all learned that in Psychology 101, except for the business idiots who must have skipped that semester. They tattoo their long, executive-sounding titles on their foreheads, dump prepackage numbers on their audience, and virtually guarantee that we want nothing to do with them. Death by generalization replaces…spontaneous, personal, and compelling details.”

Idiots says that “[g]reat business leaders live life outside the four traps. Honest language; the hard truth; a passion for what they are doing; a personality that shows up at the office five, six, or seven days a week—we recognize these people, and we love to hear from them.”

We love to hear from them because they represent honesty and integrity, a quality often lacking in today’s business climate. “Entire careers can be built on straight talk—precisely because it is so rare,” the authors state.

And what is Bullfighter? Idiots discusses an assessment tool called Flesch Reading Ease Scale, which measures readability on a 0-100 scale, with higher scores indicating easier reading. They recommend that business communications score 35 or higher. This review scores 52 (the Sunday comics scores 92 and the Wall Street Journal scores 43). Fugere, et. al., have also created a “bull dictionary” that contains over 300 words classified as overused and obscure jargon. Bullfighter combines these two tools to create a “Bull Composite Index” which scored this review as clear and understandable. Test your most recent memo at www.fightthebull.com.

At its core, Idiots is about abandoning stultifying corporate speak for the sake of expressing our individual personalities—our voice—at work, and harnessing the power of this voice to generate enthusiasm and creativity in the workplace. In this era of exploring individual purpose and mission and how these fit with our professional lives, Fugere and friends have a very timely message. “This book is about being yourself, reclaiming your voice, and letting some personality, warmth, and humor into your work life.” Simplicity and truth pack a powerful punch.

WBPSLI (see the section on acronyms!) is a great gift for yourself or for your clients and coworkers who have succumbed to the four traps—anyone with whom you want to forge authentic and effective connections and build a richer, more sustaining business partnership. Published by Free Press and $22 in hardback.