How I lost my 25-year battle against corporate claptrap

Jul 16, 2017

For nearly a quarter of a century, I have been writing columns telling
business people to stop talking rot. For the same amount of time they
have been taking no notice.

The first example I can find comes from 1994 when I wrote an article
mocking ugly business jargon, arguing that language had got so stupid
that the pendulum must soon swing back and plain talking about business
would shortly reassert itself. The words I objected to back then? Global,
downsize, marketplace and worst of all, the mathematically nonsensical
"110 per cent committed".

What an innocent age that was.

Fast forward to July 2017, and an entrepreneur sits down to write a blog
post about his company. "We are focused 1,000,000% on positive, move
forward, actionable efforts to help facilitate change." When someone
sent me this bilge last week, I read it and shrugged.

Over the past two decades, two things have happened. Business bullshit
has got a million per cent more bullshitty, and I've stopped predicting
a correction in the marketplace. I'm 110 per cent sure there won't
be one.

Not only has production risen in aggregate, the worst individual offenders
have gone on surpassing themselves, oblivious to my attempts to shame
them into stopping.

Howard Schultz is a champion in the bullshit space. The Starbucks
executive chairman has provided me with more material for columns
than any other executive alive or dead. Yet he is still at it, and
still out-doing himself. Earlier this year, he announced that the new
Starbucks Roasteries were "delivering an immersive, ultra-premium,
coffee-forward experience".

In this ultra-premium, jargon-forward twaddle, the only acceptable
word is "an". Mr Schultz has brewed up a blend of old and new
jargon, the fashionable and the workaday, adding a special topping
of his own. "Delivering" and "experience" are grim but not
new. "Ultra-premium" is needless word inflation. "Immersive"
is fashionable, though ill-advised if you are talking about scalding
liquids. The innovation is "coffee-forward". Sounds fantastic,
but what is it?

Quite possibly Mr Schultz does not read the Financial Times and the people
close to him who do read it desist from forwarding to him articles that
mock how he speaks. But even if he had seen the columns, I doubt they
would have made a jot of difference.

The business world is divided into two kinds of people. There are
those who talk tosh (the majority) and those who do not. The defining
characteristic of dedicated tosh-talkers like Mr Schultz is they simply
do not see a problem with it.

And why should they? While I have spent decades getting steamed up
about mere words he has been making a difference to the way half the
world lives and drinks. It is largely thanks to him that we all wander
around the streets carrying cardboard buckets of pale brown stuff that we
slurp through plastic lids. Not only has Mr Schultz made this difference,
he has made some money, too. About $3.1bn, in fact.

Talking rot has not only done him no harm, I fear it may have helped
him. The new "roasteries" have an exceptionally vulgar Willy
Wonka-style decor with beans whizzing around in see-through pipes. When
the style is all hype, the language needs to match.

Over the years, Mr Schultz has consistently proved just how bad language
serves business people well. So when an analyst asks if you are going
to acquire anything, you can either say no, which is a bit too bald and
clear, or you can say 34 words instead, as he did a few years ago: "I
would say that we have enough to digest in the near-term, and there's
nothing candidly in our sightline that would suggest that we're involved
in engaging anything that we're going to acquire."

Bingo. The audience will be so bored, you will never get called to
account.

Even more impressively, he has shown the way in the upping of the
emotional ante. Money can't buy you love, but love can compensate for
not much money. Thus, he recently sent an email to the 100,000 or so US
staff, most of whom he has never met and many of whom earn about $10 an
hour, with the sign-off "know that I send you my love and respect".

Guff-talkers will never change. Or rather, there in nothing candidly in
my sightline that would suggest that good sense will resume going forward.

But this doesn't make my past few decades spent campaigning
an unmitigated failure. The few people who don't talk rot get vast
pleasure in mocking those who do. These brave and simple few have been
sending me examples over the years, some of which are reprinted below. I
don't love FT readers, but I do respect and thank all those who have
furnished me with such riches.

Fluent in flannel: a guide to mastering the method

Over the past month, I have been rummaging through the collection of
business bullshit that I have built up over the past couple of decades
with a view to republishing some of the finest exhibits. But as I studied
the archive it occurred to me that all languages have their own rules
— and guff is no exception. Here, I reveal the top eight rules, along
with some splendid examples of how to follow them.

1. Never use a short word when a long one will do

If the first principle of journalism is to simplify then exaggerate,
so the first rule of guff is complicate then obfuscate.

An HR manager running an off-site meeting showed how it was done last
year by warning attendees to "be cognizant of the optics of your
personal brand". In other words: tuck your shirts in.

Management consultants have been world class at touting for business
this way, inventing problems and then offering to solve them.

A decade ago, Accenture demonstrated how to turn the banal into the
portentous: "With the rise of the multi-polar world, the task of
finding and managing talent has become more complex, turbulent and
contradictory." Never mind that the world has only two poles, and
that finding good people is no harder than ever, Accenture added value
by subtracting sense.

The interesting thing about obfuscating/complicating is that it can be
done with only a couple of words.

The best ever title of a research paper: Robustifying Learnability —
a 2005 report from the Federal Reserve.

2. Everyday euphemisms are the way forward

In guff, all negatives are spun, so no one need take full blame for
anything. Uber has done pioneering work in the past few months by
producing language so ugly and boring that the audience can only respond
by switching off.

The company has variously admitted to having "underinvested in the
driver experience" and being "in a reputational deficit", in the
hope that no one will notice it has screwed its drivers and its name
is mud.

Rule 2 is handy when companies sack people. The latest euphemism comes
from an investment management company that recently described sackings
as going "into the gym ... inducing cell renewal and thus
making the company fit for profitable growth".

Though horrible, this is nothing on how EY got rid of a number of partners
by sending a message around saying "we look forward to strengthening
our alumni network".

Not all companies get it right. In 2013, HSBC announced it would be
"demising" the roles of 942 relationship managers, forgetting that
the whole point of a euphemism is that you take something horrid and
make it sound better.

HSBC took something bad (sacking people) and made it sound considerably
worse, as if it was not only depriving people of their livelihoods but
actually killing them.

3. Disregard the grammar you learnt at school

One of the charms of guff is its syntactic flexibility — all nouns
can be verbs and vice versa. Oscar Munoz made great use of this rule
when he talked of "deplaning" a man who was manhandled roughly off
one of his United aircraft in April.

Other great examples of nerbing and vouning fill the archive: to cold
towel; a global touch-base; to effort; to front-burnerize; to town hall;
to potentiate; to future; to value add; to bonus well.

But my favourite came from a manager who, in trying to draft a memo, said:
"There must be a better way to language it." He's right. There must.

4. There is no such thing as too much emotion

It all started in 2003 when the late Jimmy Lee sent an email to everyone
in his corporate finance department at JPMorgan, saying: "Call a
client and tell them you love them. They won't forget that you made
this call."

In the years since then, Irene Rosenfeld of Kraft has described herself
as the "CEO of Joy", while John Cahill, global CEO of McCann Health,
has said: "Doubling down on our humanness will be the magic in how we
drive better outcomes."

When it comes to ratcheting up the emotion, millennials are particularly
gifted. A twenty-something Estee Lauder employee was recently quoted
in the Financial Times: "Senior leadership was ecstatic about the
level of ideation that came from this session." This, I fear, bodes
ill for us all. Passion, it would seem, is no longer enough. Ecstasy is
the next frontier.

5. If you produce something simple, rebrand it so no one will know what
it is

Over the years, Toyota has renamed the car a "sustainable mobility
solution"; Amazon has called the book a "reading container";
Speedo has rebranded the swimming cap a "hair management system"
and a Nestlé bottle of water has been described as an "affordable,
portable lifestyle beverage". This rule is the most baffling of the
lot as there is no reason for it.

6. Do not limit yourself to words that are in the dictionary

Make up your own by stitching together two or more existing ones.

The greatest ever example of this was Eversheds, a frumpy law firm, which
in 2007, tried to appeal to young recruits by looking for "knowlivators,
innovateers, performibutors, proactilopers, prioricators and winnomats"
— the last being a particularly unwinning combination of winners
and diplomats.

7. There is no such thing as too much metaphor and cliche in one sentence

Rick Hamada, CEO of Avnet, is a master at this: "Drilling down one
more click on services, we actually think of multiple swim lanes of
opportunity around business." However, he is not quite as good as
the following management consultant: "You have to appreciate that the
milestones we have set in these swim lanes provide a road map for this
flow chart. When we get to toll gates, we'll assess where you sit in
the waterfall . . . "

8. Ignore Rule 1

The most lethal new language is not a mass of robustifying
learnability. It is simpler but no less confusing.

You use short, well-known words, but the catch is you use them to mean
something different. The word of the moment is "play".

Strategy consultants pose the questions to gormless clients: Where
to play? How to win? And fashionable business people refer to working
activities as playbooks and playlists. On the lips of guff speakers,
play does not mean play. It means work.  The most gifted guff giants
don't use all the rules, but pick the ones that suit them best. My
following three eternal favourites are great in different ways, but all
deserve prizes: I am medalling (nerb) all of them.

Bronze goes to Rob Stone, co-CEO of advertising agency Cornerstone, for
heroically mixing cliche, metaphor and hot air to say nothing: "As
brands build out a world footprint, they look for the no-holds-barred
global POV that's always been part of our wheelhouse."

Silver belongs to Angela Ahrendts who, in a Burberry annual report,
wrote the most mysterious sentence ever composed in the English language:
"In the wholesale channel, Burberry exited doors not aligned with brand
status and invested in presentation through both enhanced assortments
and dedicated, customised real estate in key doors."

I have showed it to many business experts over the years, but no one
has ever been able to say what it means or explain why a raincoat maker
could be talking so intently about doors.

The runaway winner and deserved gold medallist is John Chambers who,
while CEO of Cisco, fired off an email to underlings beginning "Team",
and ending: "We'll wake the world up and move the planet a little
closer to the future."

He has used plain words and simple syntax to produce the most terrifying
piece of bullshit ever.

In the four years since he said that the planet seems to have been
reaching the future quite happily on its own, without the assistance of
Mr Chambers or anyone else at Cisco.

[by Lucy Kellaway]