Lynn Espinoza is a broadcast news veteran with more than a decade of media, presentation and executive coaching experience. She has developed personal coaching sessions for Fortune 100 C-level executives, corporate communicators of all kinds, doctors, lawyers and leaders in non-profit.
I’m a Recovering Idiot
Posted on August 20, 2009. Filed under: Latest News
This is my favorite book:
The authors are Brian Fugere, Chelsea Hardaway and Jon Warshawsky. I need to tell them that I bring their book to most of my training sessions, and promote it as “required reading” for corporate spokespeople.
I’d also like to tell them that their book led to the end of my cushy six-figure job.
I had been working for a tech-focused PR agency for seven years when my manager gave me “Why Business People Speak Like Idiots” . I was running the communication training department, and my boss thought the book would give me good fodder when training executives. The problem was, the more I read, the more I realized that I had become one of the idiots they were writing about.
Before I joined the agency, I was a good communicator; “good with the words”, as my husband likes to say. I was a TV reporter, so stories were distilled to reach the broadest audience. But after seven years in the bowels of tech PR, I had learned to talk like this:
“The challenge, at the end of the day, is to ensure we have the bandwidth to showcase our deliverables. We’ll have to ping the right stakeholders to make sure to optimize our visibility. Let’s really drill-down on our competencies to show that we have the ecosystem in place to find the connective tissue and execute the plan.”
Holy crap.
I left the agency exactly four months after reading the book. I also need to tell the authors that I have re-learned basic English, and I’m happy as a clam.
Getting rid of undecipherable acronyms and meaningless jargon is harder than it sounds. That’s because every company has both its own culture and its own language. Executives and employees are moving so fast, that it’s simply more efficient to come up with a sort of corporate shorthand. That’s how acronyms become ubiquitous; meaningless to the outside world but well understood within the corporate micro-culture.
That rationale doesn’t work for the awful jargon, however. Upper management uses jargon to sound powerful; lower levels use it to sound important. The kid in the mail room deduces that’s just the way adults talk. No one uses it for meaningful conversation.
I am of the mind that the world moves forward because of meaningful conversation, which in turn forms meaningful relationships. Those are tough concepts when we’re just talking one idiot to another.
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