I have learned many things during my time as The Journal’s business editor, but chief among them is that the business world is no friend to the English language.
Although people in the world of high commerce speak a form of English, it is often one that is not easily recognisable to outsiders, or which makes sense to the uninitiated.
From management speak to technical jargon, the crimes of the business community against our native tongue are many are varied.
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Here are some of the worst areas of offending – with a guide as to how you too can speak business (or even better, translate it into English).
Management speak
Something happens to people when they get promoted and assume management responsibility; unfortunately it is generally losing the ability to speak like a normal human being.
What is it that makes having other staff report to a person that makes them think it is acceptable to use phrases like ‘blue sky thinking’, ‘thought shower’, or ‘let me loop back to you on that one, Jeff’?
Perhaps managers speak this way to fit in with all the other managers who also lurch into this nonsense every time they flap their gums? Or maybe it is an attempt to look more intelligent than they really are?
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Either way, management speak is a creeping nightmare for everyone in the general vicinity and the offenders need to park that thought, take it offline, take a holistic view of the situation and generally avoid vertical imagineering in the workplace.
Jargon
The modern global economy is a complicated system in which many companies now perform tasks that are so specialist that only a few other companies do the same thing.
Describing what companies do can involve some fairly technical language, but too often this crosses over into the sort of jargon that leads to blank looks from anyone not inducted into the particular idioms of that industry.
One of the greatest examples of this was the American company WeWork, which is essentially a shared office space company.
But when its original management tried to float the company on the US stock market in 2019, it released a lengthy poem to self-delusion in which it described itself as a “community company committed to maximum global impact” and added: “We believe our company has the power to elevate how people work, live and grow”.
Much of the really bad jargon comes in company announcements and press releases and my team read them so you don’t have to (favourite recent example: a company that said it has “transitioned to a 100% channel business”: your guess is as good as mine...)
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Acronyms and initials
A sneaky trick of the business insider is the use of acronyms and initials, which are either (a) an attempt to make business sound more exciting than it really is, or (b) a way of excluding the non-initiated.
From B2B to CFO, WFH to Ebitda, the use of acronyms and initials can be useful when used sparingly, but becomes increasingly irksome as middle-managers descend into gobbledegook.
Portmanteau
The use of portmanteaus – where two words are smushed together to make one – is common and can make for some handy new words (alcopop, for example, or bromance).
But the business world has an insatiable lust for portmanteau and it almost always leads to crimes against language.
Probably the worst offender is “mumpreneur”, which some halfwit coined to describe mothers who start business. It has also led to other bastardisations of the word entrepreneur, such as seniorpreneur (older people starting businesses), and recently Covidpreneur (folk who have started firms during the pandemic).
Another major area of offence is technology, with increasingly niche areas of the economy trying to make themselves sound sexy by adding the suffix – tech to their name (fintech, insurtech, edtech...)
More often than not, this practice is ‘vomducing’ (work it out...)
Stupid job titles
Elon Musk, the founder of technology company Tesla, is widely considered to be a visionary in the business world.
But he has also just changed his job title from chief executive to ‘Technoking of Tesla’, suggesting that he is something of a stranger to self-awareness.
Few company executives go as far as Mr Musk in his dedication to egotism, but the daft job title is rife in the business world.
Technology companies are again some of the worst offenders, with jobs such as ‘innovation evangelist’, ‘content hero’ and ‘brand warrior’ all having crossed my desk in recent months. (The job of ‘ninjaneer’ scores double on the annoyance scale, being both a portmanteau and a stupid job title).
In the defence of the business community, however, corporations are not the only offenders in this area, and the self-employed can often lurch dangerously into self-parody in their own job descriptions (including one person who described himself as the ‘wizard of the light bulb moments’).
In summary, the world of business is a place where lovers of simple language are destined for heartache.
A defence of the business world would be that all groups of people – whether it’s the particular slang adopted by young people, or regional dialects – adopt their own way of speaking, and from that, their own insider language.
The problem with business-speak is that where dialects and slang often enrich our shared language, the vernacular of the business world is crushingly uncool.
So next time you find yourself talking about thinking outside the box, running out of bandwidth or enriching the customer journey, you might have joined the wrong gang.