Jargon, The Language Of The Lazy

HOT READS FOR THE PRACTITIONER

Title: For Better Understanding, Speak Plain English (Or Your Native Language)

Competencies: oral and written communication

Who benefits: business people

Consultant Usage: a good list of words and phrases to avoid in your practice

What’s it about? Envisia Learning is in the business of competencies.  We help organizations identify the competencies most needed by employees.  Through feedback processes, we help employees develop the needed competencies.  We call these Core Competencies.

According to a recent Forbes online article, Envisia Learning must be one of the most annoying, pretentious and useless businesses on Planet Earth!

Forbes is campaigning to eliminate business jargon from business.  Rightfully so they claim that business jargon masks real meaning.  Jennifer Chatman, management professor at the University of California-Berkeley’s Haas School of Business says “People use it as a substitute for thinking hard and clearly about their goals and the direction that they want to give others.”

One of the worst of the worst offensive business jargon is Core Competency.  Yikes, Envisia Learning is a Jargonholic!  Forbes writes “This awful expression refers to a firm’s or a person’s fundamental strength—even though that’s not what the word “competent” means.”

Forbes gathers support from Bruce Barry, professor of management at Vanderbilt’s Owen Graduate School of Business.  He writes “This bothers me because it is just a silly phrase when you think about it.  Do people talk about peripheral competency?  Being competent is not the standard we’re seeking.  It’s like core mediocrity.”

Forbes would also like all of us to buy-in to the elimination of another annoying, pretentious and useless piece of business jargon, the term “Buy-In”.  According to David Logan, professor of management and organization at the University of Southern California’s Marshall School of Business: “Asking for someone’s ‘buy-in’ says, ‘I have an idea.  I didn’t involve you because I didn’t value you enough to discuss it with you.  I want you to embrace it as if you were in on it from the beginning, because that would make me feel really good.’”

These are just two of 45 examples in the Forbes List of Annoying Business Jargon.  Take a read.  They even encourage you to vote for your favorite (or more correctly, least favorite) expression in a contest they label as “Jargon Madness”.  So get in there and let them know what you think about Best Practices, Paradigm Shift, Empower, Corporate Values and a multitude of other lazy words.

Now back to Envisia Learning.  Don’t worry about us.  If in fact we are annoying, pretentious and useless, we will change with the times.  After all, change management is one of our core competencies!

Catch you later.

Bill Bradley

Bill Bradley (mostly) retired after 35 years in organizational consulting, training and management development. During those years he worked internally with seven organizations and trained and consulted externally with more than 90 large and small businesses, government agencies, hospitals and schools.