Message Not Received. Simon Phil

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СКАЧАТЬ an employee’s ill-advised, alcohol-induced, and stream-of-consciousness tweets. (Chapter 1 begins by introducing Justine Sacco, the current queen of the dumb random tweet.) I assure you that Nadella didn’t pen his memo late at night and hit the send button by his lonesome. Other high-ranking Microsoft employees developed it with or even for him. Ultimately, everyone involved signed off on its language.

      By the same token, more than a handful of CSC’s nearly 80,000 employees work in its public relations department. If CSC outsourced the BDPaaS release, it’s highly unlikely that its PR firm operated with carte blanche. For such a critical corporate announcement, a team of people provides input. There are usually arguments over versions, terms, content, length, and even the specific words used. I have no doubt that some of CSC’s most senior executives at the company ultimately signed off on its unfortunate press release. At best, the BDPaaS announcement is unclear; at worst, it’s downright bewildering and counterproductive.

      Second, consider the result of each message. Both fail despite the meticulous planning, editing, and consensus-building that happened behind the scenes. Because each message employed nearly impenetrable language, it’s unlikely that either was fully received. A simpler, more straightforward approach would have been far more effective in each case. Less would have been more. Put differently, the problem isn’t what Microsoft and CSC announced; it’s how each company announced it.

      Third, and most germane to this book, these messages are anything but isolated occurrences. Far from it. Lamentably, similar communications have become commonplace in many professional settings, and not only from some of the biggest technology vendors. Increasingly, confusing messages seem to be becoming the norm in the business world. Referring to Nadella’s memo, Lee Hutchinson of Arts Technica echoes this sentiment: “This, sadly, is not a Microsoft-specific issue; it’s standard all across not just the tech industry but essentially every large American company.”12

The Good News about Bad Business Communication

      I see Hutchinson and raise him. Pervasive technobabble is not confined to billion-dollar corporations and the people who work for them. Troll around the Web for a few minutes. You’ll find no shortage of much smaller companies that describe their products and services in oblique manners. And this isn’t just a sales or marketing problem. Ask many knowledge workers what they do, and you may very well need a site like AcronymFinder or AcronymSearch to translate. Myriad e-mails, internal corporate memos, press releases, and blog posts bastardize business and technology terms, not to mention seemingly a good deal of marketing copy on the Web. You might not even have to surf the Web. Think about your last few company meetings and the messages piling up in your inbox. I’ll bet that you can find an example or two of poor communication.

      What are the effects of this incessant noise? In a nutshell, they’re not positive. For now, suffice it to say that intended audiences either completely tune out or don’t (fully) receive the message, much less understand it.

      As a general rule, the quality and clarity of business communication have deteriorated considerably over the past 10 years. Many people have lost the ability to communicate clearly (read: without business jargon). And, by relying far too much on one medium (e-mail), we muddy our messages even further.

      Yes, we live in very busy and noisy times. Ours is an era marked by unprecedented technological change. Fortunately, there is good news on two levels. First, in this chaos lies enormous opportunity. The demand for simple and clear communication far exceeds its supply. Many us have forgotten that good things are more likely to happen when others actually understand our messages. (For example, imagine that you are a salesperson and your competitors speak technobabble. You are the one who speaks plain English.)

      Second, we all can learn how to communicate better. Fret not; it is well within our grasp. It just requires a fundamental shift in what we say and how we say it.

Phil SimonFebruary 2015Henderson, Nevada

      PART I

      WORLDS ARE COLLIDING

      Part I begins by sketching out the roadmap for the book. It then turns to the tsunami of technology that is rapidly engulfing our lives. It examines the profound ways in which the business world is changing. Thanks to near-constant connectivity and ubiquitous technology, employees are becoming overwhelmed.

      It includes the following chapters:

      ● Introduction: The Intersection of Business, Language, Communication, and Technology

      ● Chapter 1: Technology Is Eating the World: The Dizzying Nature of Today’s Existence

      ● Chapter 2: The Increasingly Overwhelmed Employee: Is This Becoming the New Normal?

      Introduction

      The Intersection of Business, Language, Communication, and Technology

      The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.

– George Bernard Shaw

      Although he died in 1950, Shaw’s words live on, especially in the business world. Far too many executives, salespeople, consultants, and even rank-and-file employees just don’t communicate very well.

      No doubt, you know the type. Some think that they’re speaking and writing effectively when they drop ostensibly sophisticated terms such as paradigm shift, synergy, net-net, low-hanging fruit, and optics.13 These folks regularly rely on obscure acronyms, technobabble, jargon, and buzzwords when plain English would suffice. They constantly invent new tech-laden words, bastardize others, and turn nouns into verbs. They ignore their audiences, oblivious to the context of what they say and write. In other words, they “talk without speaking,” to paraphrase a popular U2 song.

      Forget for a moment a software vendor’s poorly worded press release and an incoming CEO’s cringe-worthy memo about “strategic synergies and alignments.” There’s an underlying question here: Is such jargon necessary? In other words, are today’s business and technology environments so different and complicated that they require the use of an entirely new, usually confusing vocabulary?

      For the most part the answer is no. At a high level, a good communicator should be able to explain confusing topics to teenagers without getting all technical. I have done so on several occasions. It’s really not that hard. Just remember one thing:

      At its most basic level, the word communicate means “to make common.”14

      Subject: The Other Scourge of Business Communication

      Bad business communication is a disease with significant costs and far-reaching implications. The prevalence of hackneyed and utterly meaningless terms, however, is just one of its causes.

      Let’s say that I could wave my magic wand and single-handedly eliminate the use of jargon and confusing language in every organization in the world. No longer would you hear your manager say things like, “Let’s take this offline, review our learnings, engage in some blue-sky thinking, and then circle back.” Poof! Value-adds and paradigm shifts have been vanquished forever. Grammarians and English teachers around the world would rejoice in the streets.

      Would this solve the business communication problem? Although we’d be off to a good start, the answer is no. Even the Orwellian abolishment of buzzwords would not guarantee that our colleagues, partners, bosses, underlings, СКАЧАТЬ