Business as a second language

The piece - Garbage Language: Why do corporations speak the way they do? by Molly Young - is a couple years old, but it just came across my radar, errrrr, my Twitter timeline. So it's an oldie. Almost pre-pandemic. Still, let's face it, for anyone who's ever spent more than a nano-second in corporate America, making fun of business-speak never grows old. 

How well I remember when paradigm shift started creeping into our business vocabulary, borrowed from the scientific and philosophic communities. This was the early 1980's, and paradigms were shifting all over the place. And I see from a somewhat recent vintage Corporate BINGO card that paradigm shift is still around. Think of it as buzzword emeritus.

Low-hanging fruit was another one we tossed around, and it's apparently still in use. Low-hanging fruit were supposedly everywhere: the process problems that were going to be easy-peasy to resolve, the clients it was going to be easy-peasy to snag. I don't actually remember succeeding when it came to finding low-hanging fruit. Nonetheless, at any meeting, someone was apt to run the idea of going after some low-hanging fruit up the flagpole. And we'd all nod in agreement. 

Back in the day, we were also into re: reimagine, restructure, reorganize. 

I sure spent plenty of time in my corporate days trying to reimagine wherever I was working as a rational, coherent, functional, smoothly operating place of work. Never happened. Sigh. 

The world was restructuring - and the ante later upped to something a lot more dizzying and challenging than restructuring: disruption. Talk about paradigm shifts. The disruptions that ended up up ending entire industries, well, back in the 1980's we couldn't begin to imagine them or reimagine the industries that were going to be disrupted - even when we were taking the 50,000 foot view. Those disruptors - the PC, the Internet, Uber, AirBnB -  sure were game changers.

Reorganize? As one colleague snorted, "Reorganize? That presumes we were organized to begin with." True that, but when you reorganize, you do get to downsize and right size. (Ugh.)

We also spent a lot of time noodling around with quadrants. 

We analyzed our products, trying to figure out where they landed in the BCG matrix. Were they stars (high market growth, high market share)? Cash cows (low growth/high market share)? Question marks (high growth/low market share). 

Alas, when we were being really honest with ourselves, we had to admit that our products were generally Dogs, with low growth and low market share. Once in a while, we landed a Cash Cow, but never seemed to have the ability to milk it. Given our inability to execute, we left a lot of money on the table.

The other quadrant we obsessed over was the Gartner Magic Quadrant, which evaluated all the players in a tech market space. The real magic was, of course, in the Leader quadrant (your company had a complete vision for the future and the ability to execute). 

Not everyone could be a Leader. So, as a marketing professional I learned how to spin whatever quadrant my company or product fell into - even the Niche box, where Gartner put you when you didn't have either a decent vision OR the ability to execute. (Wish I had a buck for every pitch I made to a Gartner analyst trying to get into a more favorable quadrant. Guess I just never had enough leverage.)

Execute was, by the way, an ubiquitous business buzzword. Sports and battlefield metaphors abounded.

Because we were all about the multi-tasking, we were able to juggle multiple buzzwords and quadrants. 

I guess folks no longer multi-task. According to Molly Young, they're parallel-pathing. Young is my kind of gal when it comes to BS corporate speak:

No matter where I’ve worked, it has always been obvious that if everyone agreed to use language in the way that it is normally used, which is to communicate, the workday would be two hours shorter.

The words that float in and out of corporate speech are often not at a far remove from gibberish. 

Young had this happy thought:

In theory, a person could have fun with the system by introducing random terms and insisting on their validity (“We’re gonna have to banana-boat the marketing budget”).

But, as she points out, while this may seem like fun, it's pretty much how buzzwords do just seem to emerge from nowhere and, all of a sudden, there's widespread adoption. I guess it's sort of like how items you hadn't really seen around are all of a sudden on every menu in the world. Focaccia. Caprese salad. 

A few of the terms Young catalogs: iterate moving forward, cadences, getting on the same page (an oldie but goodie).

Borrowing from Anna Wiener (author of the memoir, Uncanny Valley, about her experience working in the tech world), Young calls this way of speaking "garbage language."

It’s more descriptive than corporatespeak or buzzwords or jargon. Corporatespeak is dated; buzzword is autological, since it is arguably an example of what it describes; and jargon conflates stupid usages with specialist languages that are actually purposeful, like those of law or science or medicine. Wiener’s garbage language works because garbage is what we produce mindlessly in the course of our days and because it smells horrible and looks ugly and we don’t think about it except when we’re saying that it’s bad, as I am right now.

I'm okay with corporate speak. It may be dated, but, hey, so am I. And I'm not that finicky about jargon or buzzword, either. But the point is taken. 

Anyway, if you're up for a long read on corporate speak (by any other name), you might want to lean into Molly Young's piece.

Meanwhile, I'm thinking of one of the most idiotic things I ever heard in the world o' business

It was at my company's annual sales kickoff, when the product teams assembled with the sales force to reveal to them all the delights we had in store for them for the coming year. All the wonderful products that would just metaphorically leap off the shelves and turn into big bucks for the coin-operated sales folks.

Anyway, the head of my business unit was presenting, and here's what he had to say about our enhanced product portfolio:

We will attack the market with all the momentum of an entrenched juggernaut.

I was sitting with my boss, who leaned over to me and whispered, "Just how much momentum does an entrenched anything have." Hmmm.

Anyway, I'm really sorry that entrenched juggernaut didn't make it into the biz-buzz dictionary. Guess there was just too much competition out there. Darn the luck.