It's Official: Jargon Prevents New Business Wins

Another silly season, another business jargon chart of loathing. Last year’s pr drive top ten this year grows to a top twelve.

There seems precious little truly new jargon here. Whereas last month author Steven Poole contributed some actual fresh (dare I say, ‘snackable’) workplace craziness, this rundown’s ‘new entries’ seem pretty aged common groan-causing parlance to me, such as;

“We’re on a journey”
“If you don’t like it, get off the bus”
“Pick it up and run with it”
“Let’s get our ducks in a row”

For the most recent hatchlings, try this survey from last year via one hotel chain’s business travellers. Whilst eating a bacon wrap^[*].

But let’s get on all fours and segment the swimlane (…couldn’t resist) of Sales.

I’m indebted here to the Plain English Campaign. Here’s their founder, Chrissie Mahler;

“Management speak gets in the way. It acts as a barrier to procuring new business.”

It is indeed, “downright dangerous”. It not only slimes from mangled everyday phrase misuse, but also acronyms and co-opted technicals.

I once wept and wailed seeing the term smarketing. As if sales and marketing could ever wed. Even inc magazine once buzzfed their value-added expertise here.

To echo one of the many plain english campaigning points – ‘teenage-ready T&Cs’ – how much are your materials and pitches ‘buyer-ready proposals’?

Audit at once. We can certainly do without a self-imposed barrier to writing new contracts.

* Such a tasty concept that it may require a blog all of its own.
“Bacon Wrap; when you take something good and elevate it to excellence by changing it or adding value to it.”
Clearly coined by muppets, as a bacon wrap is no way and, nowhere near any improvement whatsoever on a bacon sarnie, so clearly more a non-improvement improvement, rather…?

footnote ii – The day I landed on the ‘inc’ site link above, their top promoted sidebar story was on the famed demo format Tell-Show-Tell. The very way I was first ever taught to run-through software myself. Always worth reflecting on …