Cut the Corporate Speak


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.

Blue sky thinking

This is the idiot brother of thinking outside the box from the dysfunctional brain dump family. This phrase, meant to convey inclusive creative thinking and brainstorming, had impact the first ten million times a project lead said it during a Powerpoint presentation. There’s an ad agency I won’t name whose site headline is this:

COMPANY NAME + BLUE SKY THINKING = RESULTS

Well, I hope those results are good. Especially if you’re an ad agency and I’ve invested a weighty chunk of my marketing budget on your services. You better be thinking creatively.  If I pay for a service, shouldn’t I expect a result? Do other agencies charge extra for results? Is that what makes you unique? What the ad agency headline should say:

COMPANY NAME + CLICHE = UNORIGINAL x LAZY

Rule: Reward your site visitors/potential customers with a meaningful message. The results will be in the black ink.

Cutting edge

Unless you’re employed by a blacksmith or scissors company, stop saying this. If your technology, product, idea or blue sky thinking is so advanced, why degrade it with an overused description that won’t rent any space in your reader’s mind? Here is the opening line from a university hospital radiology website page:

We offer cutting edge technology applied to patient care based uniquely in both an academic setting and community hospital.

Zzzzzzz. Wh-wh-what? Oh, sorry. I fell asleep typing that. As a patient in your hospital, it is my hope that your technology is modern when you’re scanning my innards for something foreign. By “cutting edge technology” do you mean digital imaging? 64-slice CT scanning? I’m relieved they “apply” cutting edge technology to patient care. If they didn’t, all that expensive diagnostic equipment would monopolize the bedpan closet while the patient lies there like a breathless fish.

Rule: When you go for grand statements like cutting edge, your language comes out limp, false and flabby. Tell a detailed fact instead.

Wrap your mind around

Can you wrap your mind around why someone would use four words to say understand? Effective communicators don’t speak in pretentious imagery. If your mind is wrapped around something, I suggest you seek cutting edge medical technology applied to patients immediately.

Is there a case for these phrases? Maybe their familiarity makes some people feel like a part of something. Speaking the lingo makes them a local. Possibly. But be careful with the words employed in branding your business. The freshest voice is the memorable voice. For example, societies loves their proverbs. In the West, we say,

Don’t count your chickens before they hatch.

The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence.

In Korea they say,

Even a fish would stay out of trouble if it kept its mouth shut.

Where there are no tigers, a wildcat is self-important.

You enjoy reading the unfamiliar more because it’s fresh and new.

Rule: Take it easy on verbose, overused expressions. They turn your branding into background noise.

Mission Critical

This is a personal peeve from working with so many U.S. defense contractors. There aren’t enough backspace buttons for this phrase. It’s said so much in this industry that it no longer has any impact. Preventing terrorist attacks at home or abroad is no joke, so stop using language with all the punch of a shadowboxer. A Homeland Security white paper reads,

DHS is comprised of many organizational elements with a single purpose: to enable, support and expedite the mission-critical objectives of DHS’ seven operating components and Directorates…

Was this message meant for humans? Here’s another sentence two paragraphs down,

S&T must work with its valued customers in the creation of ORDs that accurately reflect their mission-critical operational requirements through active participation in the requirements development initiatives.

What?

Rule: Tighten. Revise. Rewrite. It’s simple: don’t repeat words, ideas or phrases unless they add muscle to what you want to say.

There are tons more, like tee it up or take offline. Here’s the point, you’ll call your company’s marketing copy and content good when it

  • Doesn’t waste words.
  • Speaks authentically to humans, whether business to business or business to consumer.
  • Makes the reader believe you’re an industry authority.
  • Asks something of the readers.
  • Rewards the reader with new ideas, understanding, inspiration, and meaning.

And on that note, I need to edit this article. It’s never going to be perfect, but a good polishing helps us fail a little better with every draft.


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https://www.facebook.com/Michelle.Burleson.Writer It ain't pretty, but they are! *** I shot out of my mother's womb ready to write The Great American novel and then its screenplay adaptation. Beyond that, I'm all about seeing the world from the saltwater, one session at a time. I also like raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens... and not because they taste like chicken.

Discussion

  1. Sid on the 9th March

    Nice Article .. Very Helpfull Thanx .. 😀

  2. Pro Nomad on the 10th March

    Great article. A few of use used to secretly play bulls**t bingo at work whereby in meetings whomever could count the most number of “corporate speak” lingo in a meeting won. I’m pretty sure the record is well over 100 in 1 hour.

    I’ve been travelling for the last 10 months, trying to make a career out of working online – living the nomad lifestyle. For the first month, it was so refreshing to get away from the office and hear people talk normally for a change. Articles like yours Michelle are a reminder to me that the office is not the kind of environment I want to be in.

    My personal favourites are :
    “Make sure we are singing from the same hymn sheet”
    “Let’s not reinvent the wheel”
    “You can’t fit a square peg in a round hole”

    Mark
    my blog – http://www.pronomad.net

  3. Pro Nomad on the 10th March

    Great article. A few of use used to secretly play bulls**t bingo at work whereby in meetings whomever could count the most number of “corporate speak” lingo in a meeting won. I’m pretty sure the record is well over 100 in 1 hour.

    I’ve been travelling for the last 10 months, trying to make a career out of working online – living the nomad lifestyle. For the first month, it was so refreshing to get away from the office and hear people talk normally for a change. Articles like yours Michelle are a reminder to me that the office is not the kind of environment I want to be in.

    My personal favourites are :
    “Make sure we are singing from the same hymn sheet”
    “Let’s not reinvent the wheel”
    “You can’t fit a square peg in a round hole”

    Mark

  4. Domenick on the 10th March

    Nice and entertaining read Michelle. Alot of companies are like robots in some ways, they can’t help it, and I suppose those cliches and jargon messages and tag lines make them feel even better about themselves, something of stature, who knows. But you did make some valid points, small biz and entrepreneurs could take heed of this message.

    “Tighten. Revise. Rewrite. It’s simple: don’t repeat words, ideas or phrases unless they add muscle to what you want to say.” – I like that. Once again good read.

  5. Brad on the 10th March

    Great post. I’m glad somebody put this into words.

    At the end of the day (ha!) heavy buzz word usage indicates lazy writing. I think it’s that simple.

  6. Ben Brooks on the 10th March

    Great thoughts, I have seen far to many websites that attempt to be clever when describing themselves. The only problem is that the only people that truly understand the cleverness, are the ones who wrote it.

  7. Tim Sanchez on the 10th March

    Very well written MIchelle. I enjoyed it.

    I’m often told that I’m concise, to the point, even blunt in some cases. I always take that as a compliment.

    Off to check out michelleburleson.com now.

  8. Julius on the 10th March

    It is really important to use simple language and avoid these types of jargon, because they either lessen or weaken the substance of a site’s content. I think that everytime we’re writing something, we should ask ourselves “Is this the way I would say things in an informal conversation?”. This is what I do whenever I notice that what I’m writing is getting too “corporate”.

  9. JT on the 11th March

    I’m sorry to read that ‘Mission Critical’ made your list! It probably is misused and abused all the time, but I work for an architecture firm that specializes in ‘mission critical’ project types, mostly data centers. In this case, the mission of the building is critical because there is no tolerance for downtime or system failure. (Would cost millions in lost productivity and potentially lawsuits against hosting companies).

    Not entirely sure what the military has in mind though…

    Do agree with ‘wrap your mind around _____’ In my line of work, that is virtually saying that ‘I don’t know, I’m stalling and can’t tell you that we haven’t looked at the problem yet.’

  10. Mike Fischer on the 14th March

    My favorite (not!) phrase is “Space age technology”. Doesn’t that imply it’s from the ’50s and ’60s?

  11. devesh on the 15th March

    Hi Michelle,
    i am a regualr visitor to your blog… every time i run out of ideas at workplace… or just want to read something new… grasp better ideas… just like your articles… i immediately shoot in at workawesome
    crazy stuff here… i do learn a lot…yours is my most favorite bookmark site….

    Devesh
    India

  12. Rick on the 1st April

    My email tagline:

    At the end of the day, we’re boots-on-the-gound going forward on the critical path of applying our core competency and following best practices, thinking outside-the-box and using our bandwidth to dialogue with you in order to identify a right-sized, best of breed solution to your action items in order to harvest some low-hanging fruit for your mission critical deliverables while avoiding a paradigm shift. (Corporate-speak 2010 style)

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