Corporate Jargon Sucks!
Graphic by Evelyn Crothal
If I was ever to make an incredibly specific haunted house, it would likely theme the bright white lights of a meeting room, with all the big shots in their tailor-made suits gibbering in a cryptic and demonic language known as the “corporate buzzwords.”
Because jargon sucks! It’s just awful! What more mind-numbing, insufferable way could there be to obfuscate the actual meaning of what you’re saying? Jargon’s just a way to make stupid things sound so much smarter than they actually are.
Jargon also hides something far more pernicious and subtle—a lack of solid, honest communication and backbone. Jargon lets people who can do something get away with doing nothing. It’s an easy way out of taking responsibility. And when people are too scared to take responsibility, it starts to slowly poison an organization or company from the inside out.
Let’s say there’s a manager for a sales team, and they have a big meeting with a high-paying client. One of the salespeople messes up, and they lose the client. Depending on the culture of the company, it’d be easy to pin the blame on the salesperson, and yet more than this, it is the leader of the team who ought to ultimately take responsibility.
Whether or not they committed the action, the revenue the team is responsible for has still been lost. It’s not very fair, is it? But the reality of being a leader, especially a good one, means owning the outcome, whether you did it or not. Too often, a leader chooses to obscure their actions with buzzwords and jargon such as “we’ll circle back to this” or “we need to improve our synergy.” But this ultimately takes away from actually getting things done.
Can you imagine if firefighters used buzzwords running into a burning building: “We need to move the needle on our synergy if we want to get the deliverables ready for the stakeholders. But we might have to table this, circle back, and pivot, because I’ve got a hard stop in fifteen.” Imagine if, instead of rescuing someone, he said to, “Ping me if you want to schedule our one-on-one. That way we can get it on the GCal.”
Not only does no one understand buzzwords, but in real life, with real people trying to accomplish anything, jargon just doesn’t work. It’s a good excuse for adults to use socially acceptable nonsense words in a way that inflates what they’re doing far beyond its actual purpose: nothing.
Buzzwords are the symptom of a growing problem, both of leaders and large company cultures losing touch with the real world, as well as a general lack of desire to take responsibility for anything. Why put that bonus on the line when you can just buzzword your way through any problem? But that sort of thinking in government, companies and even universities can kill actual doing. And if an organization isn’t doing, it withers from the inside. Haunted houses are great, but if I hear another empty buzzword, I’m running for the hills.