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Years ago when I first started out as a mar­ket­ing con­sul­tant I had a client who was a bit of a nob.

He was in fact the very first (and  last) client I ever fired. The begin­ning of the end all came when he asked me to write some copy explain­ing some highly com­plex tech­ni­cal prin­ci­ples. I did so, but I made a fatal con­sul­tancy error. I wrote them up in such a way that a reader could eas­ily under­stand them. I fig­ured that was the epit­ome of good print com­mu­ni­ca­tions.

My client how­ever was NOT impressed.

He was might­ily peeved that I’d replaced all his BIG tech­ni­cal jar­gon words with easy to under­stand words. When I explained my approach, and pointed out that lan­guage that is acces­si­ble, sells, he didn’t grasp the point. He thought it made him look sim­plis­tic. Or per­haps more to the point it made his infor­ma­tion easy to under­stand and he could no longer draw his ego about him and feel self-important.

As I said he was a nob.

The kind of nob who pep­pered his office talk with not only IT jar­gon but man­age­r­ial bumf like ‘mis­sion crit­i­cal’, facil­i­tate, solu­tions and action points.

Does nobody just ‘do impor­tant stuff any­more’? Do they all facil­i­tate the mis­sion crit­i­cal action points?

I guess I’ve been think­ing a lit­tle about busi­ness lan­guage and how our words define us.

When you first work from home you tend to split your­self into two – the busi­ness you, and the home and every­thing else you! The home you answers the phone with a cheery ‘Hello’, the busi­ness you answers the phone with a slight impor­tant very-busy-don’t-you-know tone ‘Hello, Veg­emite­vix of Vegemitevix.com!’

Then after a few years it all becomes too much effort. You put the busi­ness jar­gon away, sim­plify your life and become a whole per­son once more. It’s always fas­ci­nat­ing watch­ing peo­ple in a busi­ness envi­ron­ment try­ing to talk to the sit­u­a­tion in a man­ner befit­ting the seri­ous­ness, the matu­rity, the impor­tance of it all.

‘Look at me, look at me! Look how grown up I’ve become! I can use  oper­a­tional effi­cien­cies in a sentence!’

I’ve done it myself. It’s a dialect you slide into eas­ily, as eas­ily as slid­ing into pick­ing up a packet of Walk­ers Salt and Vine­gar crisps at the sta­tion, every day on your way to work. Easy it is. Clever it’s not.

I’ve decided to deci­pher some of my favourite busi­ness jar­gon words and phrases for your edification -

Team Player – oth­er­wise known as an invet­er­ate brown noser. This is the guy who epit­o­mises yes man. He’s so far up the bosses der­riere that he sports a choco­late coloured snoz. This guy reeks of cheap gar­den fer­tiliser. When the boss says com­mit hari kari he asks if he can do it with a toothpick!

Mis­sion crit­i­cal – Unless you work for NASA I’m uncer­tain this is an appro­pri­ate phrase. Let me sug­gest an alter­na­tive. Pick up your synapse-crushing bore­dom enduc­ing doc­u­men­ta­tion and do a quick Search and Replace. Find the words ‘mis­sion crit­i­cal’ replace with ‘impor­tant’. You could even go a lit­tle nuts and write – VERY impor­tant!

Scal­able – sim­ply means that the project could quite con­ceiv­ably work for a small bunch of peo­ple as eas­ily as for a large bunch of peo­ple. Con­sul­tants love ‘scal­able solu­tions’, almost as much as they love hol­i­days on the Costa Brava that the scal­able solu­tions provide!

Cus­tomer cen­tric – Knock, knock. Sorry mis­took you for a lump of wood. Hello! If you’re sell­ing any­thing you should be cus­tomer cen­tric, or even cus­tomer focussed. Duh! Even lit­tle Johnny on the lemon­ade stand knows if the cus­tomer doesn’t like the lemon­ade he won’t buy it. Can you think of a sit­u­a­tion that isn’t cus­tomer centric?

Take offline – it sounds so smart and fancy and 21st cen­tury, but most often this phrase is trot­ted off when peo­ple are stuck in a stuffy board­room wish­ing their col­leagues had mar­i­nated in deoder­ant to camoflage the ves­tiges of last night’s vin­daloo, and are not even online. At least in the inter­net sense. The phrase means to take a con­ver­sa­tion out of the room. Basi­cally in layman’s terms it means – stop going on about it here,  it’s your prob­lem.  Talk to some­one who gives a damn!

Cut­ting edge – ooooooooh another excit­ing lit­tle phrase that means….What exactly? Is it so new and excit­ing this tech­nol­ogy that goes ping it’s straight off the cut­ting board? Don’t know. Feel free to tackle this ‘low hang­ing fruit’ by drop­ping me a pithy expla­na­tion in the com­ments below.

Did you see that? The low hang­ing fruit. I always think of an elon­gated ball sack. Not an attrac­tive pair nei­ther. A dehy­drated male ele­phants’ pair. Can­not get that image out of my head. Unless you want your meet­ing punc­tu­ated by teenage girl gig­gles, just don’t.

A cou­ple of TLAs drive me nuts too….

BAU – not Ukrain­ian for wah wah – but means Busi­ness As Usual. Most often used in a sit­u­a­tion that is par­tic­u­larly unusual. The band play­ing on the Titanic was a strik­ing exam­ple of BAU!

COO – I often think of ‘cuck COO’ when I see this one. It stands for Chief Oper­at­ing Offi­cer, but in my mind I see the schmuck in charge of this mess.

AOB – Armed Offen­sive Bod? Angry Odif­er­ous Bod? It stands for Any Other Busi­ness. Why use the TLA? Will it really rob your life of a pre­cious three sec­onds to say the phrase in full?

At the end of the day you sim­ply are try­ing to com­mu­ni­cate solu­tions, facil­i­tate oper­a­tional effi­cien­cies, move prod­uct, or sell-in ideas, typ­i­cally by going after the ‘low hang­ing fruit’ for a quick and dirty. You need to employ blue sky think­ing, man­age change and project man­age par­a­digm shifts, ensure all par­ties are on board, whilst all the while keep­ing your eye on the ball, and eye­balling the man­age­ment. It’s mis­sion crit­i­cal that you drill down through the met­rics. The pipeline needs to be con­stantly stoked, if not full, and by close of busi­ness we should have a gran­u­lar, top-down approach imple­mented and taken on board by the great unwashed.… those who are chal­lenged by their inabil­ity to think out­side the box, as we man­agers do.

Think­ing out­side the box.

That phrase is the most uni­ver­sally despised busi­ness jar­gon but I just want to know, this:  Who put you in the box? Where is the box? Most impor­tantly of all – If you can’t get out of the imag­i­nary box, with the imag­i­nary restraints, that some­one else (you don’t know who) put you in, (with­out you know­ing), and do it all by your­self, your grip on real­ity is rather ques­tion­able and I need to ask the obvious…..

Should you really be in busi­ness at all?

What are your favourite pet-hates? TLAs that tickle your must-kill-myself-now com­plex, or greasy jar­gon that grates? I need to know, please tell me now.

Image: Flickr Cre­ative Com­mons: rob­n­rae

NB/ This post first appeared on my other blog http://www.vegemitevix.com