Jargon Makes Managers Look Like Idiots

The BBC website ran a story on Monday that merits discussion, jargon in the workplace. Now, every specialization requires specific language to discuss its arcana, but not everything is a specialization. Business management certainly isn’t because one must communicate with non-managers to be effective. Yet, there is constant “blue-sky thinking outside the box” that prevents business from explaining to employees what do to and what to do better. A permanent ban on business jargon might help.

Contrary to what Harvard, Wharton and Northwest would have one believe, business isn’t all that hard. It was invented long before writing, agriculture and the wheel. Trading stuff for other stuff can be turned into a marketing report with focus groups, but that’s merely putting whipped cream on, well, never mind.

Jargon, though, establishes a social order of insiders and outsiders. “Subdural hemotoma” separates the medically trained from those who are not. However, one can make a case that this term is vital for doctors to communicate with one another. It’s faster than “a rapidly clotting blood collection below the inner layer of the dura but external to the brain and arachnoid membrane.” At the same time, it loses no precision. This does, however, mean that non-doctors have trouble following what's going on, and that has implications in medical care, but they are minor.

Business jargon, on the other hand, is inherently imprecise and wordy for no benefit. That’s how simple things get dressed up as complicated things. “Gathering the low hanging fruit” just means, get the easy stuff first. That should be so implicit in business that saying it should be unnecessary (unless one operates an orchard or vineyard – then, it might be best to pick other fruit, but that determination is best done by someone who knows agriculture). “Blue sky thinking” is a polite way of saying daydreaming. And “architecting,” “dimensioning” and “diarizing,” despite what MicroSoft’s spell check program may say, are not real words. The MS spell checker doesn’t recognize “dura” or “arachnoid,” but they are real words in medicine. Beware spell check

Mr. Orwell foresaw much of this in 1984 in which one of the characters says “It’s a beautiful thing, the destruction of words.” In fictional Oceania, the words were simply forbidden, defined as not existing. What business jargon does is worse. It takes words that can have meaning, beauty and value when used properly and it renders them useless by devaluing their content. If a man doesn’t say what he means, he cannot mean what he says. Yet he wants one to purchase his stock.

© Copyright 2006 by The Kensington Review, Jeff Myhre, PhD, Editor. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written consent. Produced using Fedora Linux.

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