Unsuck Your Business Jargon

In 2005 a brilliant book, WHY BUSINESS PEOPLE SPEAK LIKE IDIOTS, skewered the overuse and reliance of business jargon. The gist of the book says...

“Jargon is not just about using big word to make small points. Sometimes it’s about using big words to make no point at all. For example, business idiots have figured about that when they don’t have a real strategy, they can just string together a bunch of nonsense and make one up.”

“One of the reasons business people use fifty-cent words to make a five-cent point is that they think using plain language makes them look less intelligent. That’s why we say things like ‘Initiate a project action plan’ rather than ‘Let’s get started.’ We fear that straightforward language might make us look dumb.”

To assist jargon-using business idiots in escaping vagary and verbosity for clarity and crispness is Unsuck It. It’s a crowdsourced app that offers everyday words to replace vapid business lexicon.

Try it. Contribute to it. And by all means ... USE IT!!!

Kudos to Humungo for the heads-up.

Comments

[Paul (from Idea Sandbox)]

John,

Thank you for bringing this to the table. Wow, talk about a paradigm shift!

Going forward, I can visualize myself leveraging this tool as a best practice to level set my use of jargon. At 30,000 feet this seems like a turnkey solution - something I can operationalize.

I will ping you in a few weeks to circle back, letting you know if this becomes a value-add for my company.

Net-net thanks for keeping Brand Autopsy a center of excellence.

[john moore (from Brand Autopsy)]

Paul, thanks for adding value to this dynamic exchange. You’ve dimensionalized critical customer-centric factors as it relates to leveraging language. Once you’ve activated this best practice tool and maximized results, circle back and we can further add value by engaging in some dial down dialogue. It will take some outside the box thinking for us to synergize our downstream thinking. Perhaps a lesson learned will bubble up from all this activation and cross-functional dialogue.

[Michael Phelps]

I love it! Now, since it's a slippery slope, let's all circle the wagons and think outside the box . . .