Do your eyes glaze over with the vacant stare of a dairy cow when reading most company websites, brochures, case studies, and white papers? Once I interviewed with a company whose tag line was Trust. Value. Integrity. It took me forever to figure out what their business was. After scouring their site and search engines, I deduced they were loan origination technology developers. Can you imagine what this does to potential business? Their website was jargon-jammed with corporate speak and communicated nothing. The powers-that-be who insist on cliché, jargon and words with no marketplace meaning undermine their own profit potential and branding power. As E.B. White wrote in The Elements of Style, these are the leeches that infest the pond of prose, sucking the blood of words. Let’s take a look at a few of the offenders.
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During family dinners in my household, we’d all bring an item from the kitchen to the table. None was exempt from this ritual. No matter who cooked dinner that night, everyone ended up contributing to the meal because of what they brought to the table. What they brought was incidental–the fact they brought something was what was important.
The same applies in a work environment–especially in meetings. We all have different things we bring to the table. What we bring often depends on the role we have in the organization or the area of expertise we apply every day to our work. None of these are really any different than setting a dinner table – every part of the meal is important.
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First, a confession. I don’t do what I’m about to recommend, at least not anymore. My current job involves zero paperwork, but in my previous, paper-based job, I was able to manage a mountain of paperwork while maintaining a pristinely clean desk. If you’re willing to put in a few hours to set up the general reference filing system I describe, you’ll not only find it easy to keep your desk free of clutter, but you get to the point where seeing extraneous paperwork build up on your desk will feel as unsettling as not showering. Think of clutter management as information hygiene.
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