Why Business People Speak Like Idiots
A Bullfighter's Guide
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- $24.99
Publisher Description
An entertaining, wickedly witty, and eminently practical guide to cutting through the swamp of jargon-filled and often meaningless corporate-speak and learning to communicate effectively for those those who want to climb the corporate ladder but refuse to check their personalities at the door.
Every day, we get bombarded by an endless stream of filtered, antiseptic, jargon-filled corporate speak, all of which makes it harder to get heard, harder to be authentic, and definitely harder to have fun.
But it doesn't have to be that way. Why Business People Speak Like Idiots exposes four traps that transform us from funny, honest, and engaging weekend people into boring business stiffs:
-The Obscurity Trap: Death by jargon, TLAs (three-letter acronyms), wordiness and evasiveness. Listeners and readers tune out, and think bad thoughts about whoever unloaded all of this crap on them.
-The Anonymity Trap: Death by templates, standards, and the abandonment of personality in favor of conformity. People like stories and personalities, and business writers seem on a mission to exterminate any trace of either.
-The Hard Sell Trap: Death by perpetual sales mode. Our immune systems have figured out that commercials are garbage, a good time for the brain to slip into idle. But business writers feel like they're not really working unless every sentence is selling something. The result: we all tune out.
-The Irrelevance Trap: Death by generalization and the rise of the presentation-in-a-can. It's the hundreds of pages of statistics that don't make a point. What does the audience want to know?
This is your wake-up call. Personality, humanity, and candor are being sucked out of the workplace. Let the wonks send their empty messages. Yours are going to connect. So grab your cape and sharpen your sword. It's time to fight the bull!
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Dull, verbose, evasive language that disguises empty-headed cliches with jargon-drenched hype is pilloried in this diverting indictment of everyday business-speak. The authors are consultants, and their familiarity with the subject, enhanced through their side job peddling "Bullfighter" anti-jargon software, gives their irreverent critique a funny, knowing edge. Besides ridiculing some ripe samples of corporate pseudo-communication, they offer advice on the art of "persuasion" in every genre, from the humble e-mail to the shareholders' address, and throw in tips on public speaking, dress and deportment. Much of their advice-keep things concrete and specific, talk about what your audience is interested in-is fine, but some suggestions, like spicing up corporate presentations with ethnic humor, sexual innuendo and mild profanity, are certain to backfire. The authors also open themselves to their own critique. They throw around buzzwords like "authenticity," vapid cliches like "being you is all you'll ever need" and meaningless hype like "one-quarter of the gross domestic product is linked to persuasion." One of their recommendations for making presentations "spontaneous" and "personal" is to download anecdotes from an anecdote Web site. An injunction to brevity is translated into a mindless bean-counting formula proscribing sentences longer than 21 words (a figure derived from the "Flesch Reading Ease Scale"). And while they complain that "technology...makes it too convenient to automate the one part of business that should never be outsourced: our voice," their signature remedy for turgid, jargon-riddled prose is to run it through their anti-jargon computer program. The authors deliver a scintillating diagnosis of the problems in business communications, but sometimes their cure for the disease is the disease. Photos.
