If you've ever worked in a corporate setting before, corporate jargon is a familiar, hated fact of life.
Stuff like this can be pretty frustrating:
"Our company has a new strategic initiative to increase market penetration,
"maximize brand loyalty, and..." [fades into gibberish speech]
It's easy to wonder if there isn't a simpler way to communicate at work
and it seems like the higher up in the corporate ladder you go, the worse the jargon gets.
Managers are perhaps the most notorious for this.
and I'm not criticizing technical jargon, which is necessary to describe specific details in every industry.
I'm criticizing fluff jargon. Corporate speak. The kind of vague lexicon that makes up so much of office working life.
It isn't just inefficient, it allows for confusion and corruption to hide in plain sight.
Look, there are valid reasons to say this:
"Keep things high-level, and go after the low-hanging fruit."
But there aren't that many reasons. Sometimes it's to soften bad news.
"We're restructuring and optimizing capital location," sounds a lot better than "we're firing people."
"You're a great candidate with a lot of exciting prospects," is a better intro to a job rejection letter than the truth:
"You weren't qualified enough."
Other times it's to sound more professional. "Let's double down on our 80/20 operations,"
sounds a lot more respectable than, "let's do more of the stuff that makes us money."
These are all legitimate ways to use corporate jargon, but mash together too much corporate speak
and it can render speech and writing all but incomprehensible.
In fact, as a testament to this, Andrew Davidson made a corporate lingo generator online
that spits out professional sounding gibberish.
For example: "We have robust networks of strategic assets that we own or have contractual access to,
"which give us greater flexibility and speed to reliably deliver widespread logistical solutions.
"We have metamorphosed from an asset-based pipeline and power generating company
"to a marketing and logistic company whose biggest assets are its well-established business approach and innovative people."
And this is exactly where corporate lingo and jargon has a dark side.
It allows people to hide things in plain sight without anyone noticing.
As i read that randomly generated statement full of jargon, your eyes probably glazed over a little.
You probably didn't pay that close of attention and that's exactly what the people writing or saying these things want or expect.
They are designed that way. In fact, what I just read wasn't from Andrew Davidson's site at all.
It was Jeff Skilling's final letter to the Enron shareholders reassuring them that everything was fine.
You know, right before it went under as one of the most blatant and fraudulent companies of the decade.
And it isn't just used in business. In this clip, Jack Abramoff, an infamous lobbyist in Washington,
reflects on some of the tricks of language he used to get things done for his clients.
"What we did was we crafted language that was so obscure, so confusing,
"so uninformative, but so precise to change the US code."
"Here's what you tried to get tacked on to this reform bill:
"Public law 100-89 is amended by striking section 207 (101 stat. 668, 672)."
"Right, now isn't that obvious what that means?"
"So that's what you tried to get inserted
"Yes."
"and that was gonna provide for a casino."
"Yes."
"And who on Earth is gonna know that?"
"No one except the chairman of the committees."
"And it was deliberately written like that-"
"Precisely."
Precisely. That's what's so interesting about this.
The word choice is precise, the meaning intentionally vague.
Sometimes, pages of documents are dedicated to hiding one message within the white noise of platitudes.
That's the old, "You Didn't Read the Fine Print," trope in movies like The Social Network
and is how people get "Zuckerberg'ed."
Interestingly, the noise of corporate jargon Is measurable.
In 1946, a man named Dr. Rudolf Flesch designed a formula to calculate how easily understood something is.
It's called the Flesch Readability Score. The higher the score, the easier to read and comprehend. The lower the score, the more difficult it is.
Just a few landmarks to think about: newspaper comics scored a 93, Sports Illustrated a 63, the Wall Street Journal, 43
and the IRS tax code, (the holy book of confusing corporate jargon,) comes in at an impressive negative six.
Now, obviously there are complex ideas that can never be expressed with a 90+ readability score
but most complex ideas can be expressed in the 30 to 50 range which is considered to be difficult reading.
Below 30, the Flesch formula considers the document to be very confusing.
Now let's get back to corruption.
In the book "Why Business People Speak Like Idiots," The Authors use this Flesch Readability test
to analyze the shareholder letters from CEOs at the turn of the century.
They analyzed a set of well-respected companies and a set of companies that have been riddled with scandal.
As it turns out, the admired companies all have letters in the 40 range of readability
while the companies that had scandals all had much more confusing letters coming in at the 20s and below.
And that's because the companies with scandals have every incentive to be very confusing and used vague jargon to do it,
while a company that has legitimate business practices has every reason to be forthcoming.
Okay now, obviously not all confusing jargon is meant to hide corruption,
but when there is corruption to hide, corporate language is a great way to do it.
You can say a lot without saying anything at all or say everything while making it sound like nothing.
So let's stop circumventing the normally understood value-added lexicon with derivative proxies
and instead
and instead -- talk normally.
By the way, if you're interested there's a political movement called The Plain Language movement
who have voiced a lot of the concerns you heard in this video.
You can check out their website in the description below.
