No Bull: Time To Declare War Against “Market-Moving Dialogue”

by Freddy Tran Nager, Founder of Atomic Tango + Guy Who Knows Jargon Enough To Avoid It; photo by Daniel Roth on Unsplash…

Quick, guess what this company is selling:

“We provide a platform for market-moving dialogue by connecting decision makers through actionable exchange, revolutionizing the way 21st century companies create value.”

If you guessed that was referring to a business conference, you speak good jargon. Keep it up, and someday you might speak at such events… while everyone in your audience focuses on their phones. (Thanks to Kevin Elliott of Hill+Knowlton Strategies for sharing this quote, which he received in an email from a vendor.)

Although reading that quote is like chewing sand — but not as fun — too many execs think such jargon makes them sound “professional.” As the old expression goes, “If you can’t dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bullshit.”

But jargon makes the user sound unintelligible or, worse, like they’re hiding something — such as a complete lack of talent. Not even con artists speak like that: they employ casual, conversational language so that their marks will understand clearly, and not suspect anything.

Blame It On The Other B.S. (Business Schools)

In his entertaining and enlightening article “The Management Myth,” Oxford-educated philosopher Matthew Stewart eviscerates the mediocre thinking that passes for modern business wisdom. Along the way he also tackles the perpetrators’ communication skills — or more exactly, the lack of them.

“Next to analysis, communication skills must count among the most important for future masters of the universe. To their credit, business schools do stress these skills, and force their students to engage in make-believe presentations to one another.

On the whole, however, management education has been less than a boon for those who value free and meaningful speech. M.B.A.s have taken obfuscatory jargon — otherwise known as bullshit — to a level that would have made even the Scholastics blanch.

As students of philosophy know, Descartes dismantled the edifice of medieval thought by writing clearly and showing that knowledge, by its nature, is intelligible, not obscure.”

As a recovering MBA myself (Class of 2005), I can certify that everything Stewart describes is painfully true. I endured it, I survived it, and today I strive to remedy it, one student at a time.

The sad part is when the B.S. bubbles out of the ivory towers and into the modern marketplace.

Matthew Stewart’s article was published nearly 20 years ago. Others have also addressed the banality of jargon, including the book Why Business People Speak Like Idiots written by Deloitte consultants.

Yet rivers of eye-watering jargon still flow freely down Wall Street through Silicon Valley across our social media feeds and into our email inboxes.

I came across the following ad on LinkedIn.  (Of course, since it’s on LinkedIn, it has to begin with the gratuitous “excited to announce…”)

It doesn’t just mix metaphors, it blends, purees, and regurgitates them into something undigestible. Instead of “market moving dialogue,” we get vowel movements.

Or, as we say in the real world, that’s a whole lotta bullshit.