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Why Jargon Is Bad for Your Business -- and How To Eliminate It (condensed version)

Jon Marcus | July 11, 2017 | Entrepreneur.com

Actionable. Best practices. Bottom-of-funnel. Buy-in. Circle back. Close the loop. Commoditize.
Deliverables. Dividend yield. Drill down. Future-proof. Ideate. Incent. Leverage. Net-net.
Operation-alize. Paradigm. Scalable. Solutions provider. Top-of-funnel. Top-line metrics.

These are just a few examples of the jargon, gibberish and acronym-ese that increasingly clog the
arteries of commerce, confusing customers, alienating potential investors and annoying everyone else.

The epidemic of business jargon may have started innocently -- as when complex concepts needed to
be shared among expert colleagues -- but has since taken on a life of its own, with jargon begetting
jargon in an endless loop. “It’s easy to be co-opted by the vocabulary of the environment in which
you’re working,” says Caron Martinez, an academic at American University who during the summers
is a consultant helping midlevel bank examiners at the FDIC forsake jargon for clear language. “You
start to speak acronym-ese.”

Once that takes root, it can be abused in all manner of ways. Some people use jargon because they
think it makes them sound smart, says Michael Shmarak, principal at Sidney Maxwell Public Relations,
near Chicago. “Intellectual chest-thumping,” Shmarak calls it. They opt for needlessly complex words
such as “utilize” when they mean “use” or phrases such as “optimize bottom-of-funnel efficiencies”
when they mean “close more deals faster.”

“You can always tell an insecure professional by their use of big words,” says Frederick Talbott, who
has taught leadership communication for three decades.

Others nod their heads and passively accept such patter out of fear of looking dumb. Jeremy Greenberg,
head of the executive advisory firm Greenberg Strategy and an enemy of jargon, tested this once. He
asked an analyst at a crowded presentation in New York whether the findings he had shared were
“siguous.” The analyst paused and then responded that he’d check. But there is no such word as
siguous, as Greenberg knew. “And not one of the whole 30 people said, ‘I don’t know what that is.’

“This is the herd mentality,” he explains. “No one wants to be the person who says, ‘Hey, I don’t know
what that means.’”

Others still actually enjoy being part of a team that has its own impenetrable language. That makes
matters worse. John Murphy, an MBA who works in online advertising in California and runs a humor
site called MBA Jargon Watch, says these words are often used “to obfuscate purposely or to signal
some group affiliation. And there, instead of clarifying speech or helping people communicate in a
more efficient way, it’s doing just the opposite.”

While jargon overload seems like merely an annoyance, it can also have steep costs -- especially for
entrepreneurs. “If a person can’t explain something to me so I understand it as an investor, how in the
world can a consumer or a business buyer understand it?” asks Deb Gabor, who has reviewed
thousands of pitches from hopeful startups in her role as founder of Investorpitches.com. “That’s where
investors totally glaze over. The investor may be thinking that the person may not really know what
they’re talking about, because they can’t break it down into step-by-step terms. That’s where you tend
to lose investors.”

Now a movement is afoot to prod business students, entrepreneurs and midcareer professionals into
forsaking jargon and speaking like, well, human beings. It’s being spearheaded by business schools in
response to employer complaints about their graduates, and pushed by investors tired of trying to
translate indecipherable sales pitches. It echoes a years-old effort to help scientists and engineers
convey the value of their work to broader audiences that, after all, include the customers, policymakers
and taxpayers on whose support that work depends.
“People are just starting to pay attention to this, finally,” says Mary Groves, a lecturer in business
communication at the College of Business at the University of Nevada, Reno. “It’s not the point of
communication to make yourself sound smarter; it’s about making yourself clearer so you can get what
you want.”

While about two-thirds of graduates believe they know how to speak and write clearly, only about a
quarter of the people who hire them agree, according to a survey by the National Association of
Colleges and Employers. That’s an even more troubling disconnect at a time when complex new tasks
such as data analytics demand clear explanation. So Vanderbilt has started to require that students
practice writing business plans before they take a lingo-laden course. To improve their public-speaking
skills, they’ve also been made to get onstage and take a stab at stand-up comedy, with its do-or-die
need for active listening, crowd-reading, and perfect timing and delivery.

The University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business uses improv to do this, as well as acting-class
techniques. All the students in Purdue’s Krannert School of Management have to take courses in the
university’s school of communication. Students at the Farmer School of Business at Miami University
are required to take two business communication classes, and to write about business research in clear,
concise ways that both wonks and laypeople can understand. And Fordham puts its business students in
a simulated television studio to explain to a mock cable-news reporter, in five minutes or less, why
their fictional CEO is innocent of insider trading; the interviews are then critiqued by New York City
journalists and PR pros.

So how do you break through those high walls of multisyllabic jargon? The experts are blunt.

“Dumb it down. Dumb it down. Dumb it down,” says Blumenfeld. “You want your grandma to
understand it.”

And dumb it down they have. Talbott, the man who brought stand-up comedy to Vanderbilt (he has
since moved to the University of Richmond), focuses on what he calls the five C’s that all
entrepreneurs should have in their heads. Business communication, he says, must be clear, concise,
complete, correct and compelling. Heidi McKee, director of the Howe Writing Initiative at Miami
University’s Farmer School of Business, has six C’s: clear, coherent, correct, concise, confident and
considerate.

Groves assigns her budding executives to take an overly long, badly written memo from a fictitious
colleague in the accounting department prattling on about expense reports and revise it into a
four-sentence email. Try it, she counsels; it’s amazing how many extra words tend to show up in
business communication. Shmarak preaches what he calls the five-sentence rule. That’s the length to
which he says any business email or memo should be limited. Martinez tells clients to write to the
specific audience. A note to a CEO should differ from one to a client.

PR guru Shmarak illustrates this more effective method with an example from an unusual source -- The
Muppets Take Manhattan. In the movie, executives of a soap company struggle with a slogan. Again
and again, they try long and convoluted concepts too smart for their own good.

Then Kermit the Frog suggests one: “Ocean Breeze Soap will get you clean.”

“You mean, just say what the product does?” asks one of the executives, bewildered.

“No one’s ever tried that before,” says another.

From https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/296171