Essay

Corporatespeak
Deconstructing the New Language of Business

by Jeff Leiper

One of the best jobs I ever had was as a clerk in a locally owned paint shop. Like most close-knit workplaces, we had a jargon all our own. For example, an emergency weekend order of wood stain from our out-of-town location was translated as "I P.O’d 36 water beader from one of the partners in K-Town." As shorthand, it worked well. However, another one of the words we often used was a little stickier. We referred to our customers as "consumers." It was a private shop thing — not for consumers’ ears. One afternoon, I discovered why.

While passing on part of a customer’s order to another clerk, I referred to him as a "consumer." It went something like this:

Me: Jason, this consumer’s wondering if he can also get a gallon of B-24 J-24?
Consumer: Please don’t call me that.

It was one of the most valuable lessons in business, and the language of business, that I ever learned.

Stripping Away Meaning

People don’t respond well to reductionist labels — consumer, bum, black, white, Muslim — and I’ve resisted their use ever since. They eliminate possibilities and strip away layers of meaning to get to the base definition of a person’s worth and role.

The gentleman I referred to as a consumer that day was a man with a job, a house and a family. His leisure time (golf? oil painting? the art of sensual massage? I never did find out) was important, and he just wanted his deck to look good. I have similar facets to my life, but that’s not to say he and I were the same. A single word can strip a person of his or her lifetime of experience and work and accomplishments. The man before me that day was not a consumer — he was a customer on whose business I depended. I hope he never came back. It would have served me right.

That epiphany has been on my mind a great deal of late as the world’s developed economies plunge to depths not seen since the 1980s, and as daily news of mass firings replace National Post headlines bemoaning the brain drain. Since leaving the paint shop, I’ve worked as a trade journalist in the information and communications technologies (ICT) sector. Where once I revelled in my ability to tell customers that paint quality was a function of the quality of titanium dioxide, solvents and the proportion of poly-vinyl acetate to acrylic binders — big words to beat the band — I am now immersed in a world of jargon far greater.

Business has a language all its own that changes almost daily. It is a language that is limiting, that denies possibility, and that excludes creative thinking. It is also the language with which industry players must grapple in their struggle to make money from new technology.

The Internet’s potential is vast and not yet understood, but until those wishing to make commercial use of it develop a language in which they can explore creative avenues, the Internet is doomed to suffer more dot-com meltdowns. As I discovered, people are not consumers who will automatically consume whatever comes down the pipe.

The New Newspeak

Language that serves short-term commercial interests is crippling us in the long term. Our industry shorthand has become so ingrained that it has replaced original, useful meaning. Each time we rob words such as "content" and "partner" and "solution" of their meaning, and each time we deny ourselves the use of language that clearly communicates our meaning and ideas, we are dealing a blow to the promise of the Internet. There are ways to make money from a communications technology that will soon wire every human being to every other, but the language we use today won’t allow us to tap that potential.

Perhaps the best parallel can be drawn from Orwell’s dystopian 1984. We use Orwell’s Newspeak when we should be emphasizing clarity.

I remember two things clearly about the year 1984. First, that I read 1984 and second, that with my stepfather, I spent hours hooking up our Commodore64 with CompuServe. The two events imprinted themselves on me and I have come to view them as intertwined ever since.

At the time, network television and the daily press were running specials about Orwell’s novel and issuing report cards on his prescience. The media, however, were wrong to focus on technology instead of language as the yardstick by which the book should be judged, either in Orwell’s world or our own. The key lesson of 1984 should be drawn from the book’s appendix, "The Principles of Newspeak," written in 1948, two years after his seminal essay "Politics and the English Language."

A key passage from the appendix:

These [Newspeak] words, necessarily few in number, had had their meanings extended until they contained within themselves whole batteries of words which, as they were sufficiently covered by a single comprehensive term, could now be scrapped and forgotten. The greatest difficulty facing the compilers of the Newspeak Dictionary was not to invent new words, but, having invented them, to make sure what they meant: to make sure, that is to say, what ranges of words they cancelled by their existence.

It’s ironic that, ultimately, it was not government that wrote the new Newspeak, but corporations with the same intent. Forced by market pressure to deliver good news, the language of ICT businesses has evolved to describe activities using terms that gloss over poor results, describe events by not describing them, and by adopting jargon that is ultimately meaningless.

In May 2001, a Microsoft Corp officer reported the company’s quarterly results:

"Our growth is very much trending up in a month-over-month situation," Ed Suwanjindar, a product manager with Microsoft’s mobility group, said in an interview.

"We continue to beat our numbers from the prior month. Our OEMs are ramping production and we’re gaining a lot of traction with all our key audiences," Suwanjindar said.

What is Suwanjindar saying about the company’s results? Is there growth or is it "trending"? When OEMs are "ramping" production, does that mean production of components is higher, and that Microsoft is buying more? Are "audiences" customers or investors or the media? What is "traction"? Ramping and traction are, presumably, good things, but the point must be made that they contain within them the kernel of Orwell’s warning: that words are being made to envelop a diversity of meaning without offering the reader assistance in understanding what, exactly, the meanings are beside the reductionist "good." There are no shades of grey in the official’s comments, no indication of whether growth resulted from profits or revenue or customers, and no indication whether traction translates into sales of products or services.

But Suwanjindar’s comments and others like them are the least worrisome for the long-term future of Internet businesses. Companies and their public relations teams have always tried to use language in such a way that appears to answer questions about performance, while responding to competitive pressures not to. While it makes the job of analysts and journalists more difficult, his statement can be probed quickly against publicly available numbers, and taken with a grain of salt.

A Case in Point

More troubling, however, are the ways in which companies speak to their shareholders, customers, and employees about something as fundamental as what their business is about. Responding to pressure to use language that conforms to the way other companies speak (lest they not be taken seriously by investors), companies use high-level language that ultimately detracts from the products and services they provide to make money. Technology and Internet companies use jargon because they’re expected to, but too often Newspeak stands in for the real work of describing viable, dynamic businesses.

The Internet is rife with such examples, including Toronto-based Itemus Inc., one of Canada’s highest-flying dot coms. The company brochure described Itemus as providing

... Global 2000 clients with research, strategic services and technologies that harness the Internet for business innovation. Organizations gain competitive advantage from: itemus research that intersects corporate strategy, organizational change, and emerging technologies; strategic services to design and deploy new business models; and technologies to build and implement next-generation solutions. itemus architects and delivers client-specific solutions by combining its own capabilities with a global network of partners.

The company, headed by bright young executive Jim Tobin, bought other companies with promising technology, and integrated their operations to exploit areas where combined products and services would have greater market appeal with lower delivery costs. It was a sound-enough business strategy, but something went terribly wrong.

Today, Itemus is bankrupt. Prior to shuttering operations in the summer of 2001, the company had spent nearly $50 million to acquire and invest in other companies and had $22.5 million in the bank. While a single bad investment has been blamed for the fall, the company had clearly already fallen on hard times to burn through as much cash as it did. Perhaps if it had told a different story, employing different language, the tale might have ended differently.

Tobin is likely a victim of MBA-speak, a language that emerged in the mid 1990s to describe Internet ventures. It was an untested language, spouted with the conviction that only the young and unbeaten can muster.

The language used by Tobin (who graduated from Harvard, which is often ridiculed for producing a generation of MBA graduates responsible for the greatest of the dot-com debacles) and others graduating from prestigious business schools became de rigueur to excite the interest of investors large and small. The more cutting edge, and ultimately meaningless, the language, the more a company stood to win venture capital from new firms in Boston, New York, San Jose and Ottawa.

As a result, I’m convinced Itemus never fully understood what it was in the business of providing. By the beginning of this century, "solutions" had become a commonplace stand-in for the oldspeak "products and services." The phrase "architects and delivers client-specific solutions" is utterly devoid of meaning, and uses the kind of fabricated language that’s at the root of Orwell’s Newspeak (architects is not a verb — a signature element of the language).

The Elevator Pitch

One particularly Orwellian characteristic of MBA-speak further reduced a language of diverse vocabulary to as few words as possible. The "elevator pitch" presumed that a venture capitalist had 30 seconds to devote to your company or idea before deciding whether to pursue talks. A brief stint working for a PR firm a few years back required that I collaborate with companies on their elevator pitches. One company I worked with had a solid product and business plan, but one wouldn’t know it from the pitch we developed.

The promising company manufactured hardware that took over security functions in computers while they communicated with each other. Providing security was a paramount concern, but to do it properly required the use of certain resources that bogged down the computer systems. The company developed a low-cost add-on to enable computers to continue communicating at regular speed while authenticating users and encrypting messages. I would not be surprised to see this company’s gear in every computer sold one day. For the time being, however, the firm has halted important R&D work and has laid off workers because of a lack of demand. Where did the company go wrong?

I would argue that the company never told the press and customers what it did. Our elevator pitch, such that it was, presented the following message:

We’re building the ultimate e-trust engine.

That’s the message I pitched to journalists when we sought positive ink and that’s the message we gave analysts. That’s how we built the web site. And, to make things worse, that’s how we thought of the company — as a provider of the ultimate e-trust engine — and not as a provider of an important product with a compelling business case.

The motivations of those who paid me were clear enough. Companies had to be seen as more than providers of "goods or services," those workaday terms that communicate a firm’s functions. We discarded specific, meaningful words and instead employed the broad but meaningless "engine" in an effort to appear more critical to the world than we were. The implication was, that without this company, the Internet would remain an insecure high sea of theft and piracy. My tip-off that things were not as they should be came when the VP of business development gave us a jargon-filled PowerPoint presentation without ever telling us what the product was, how it was shipped, how it was used, or what it cost.

If this company ever comes back from the brink, I hope it will be because it uses specific language describing real products and concepts to sell itself to investors and customers. In truly Orwellian fashion, we’ve forgotten that the company’s solutions, its "engine," could be any number of things. We use broad labels ignoring the subtleties of language that persuade, dispensing with the most valuable tool we have to excite imagination.

Offering "Content"

Dozens of examples of this type of language surround us. The word "content" is easily one of the most offensive of the Newspeak terms. At their peril, companies ranging from big broadcasters to small e-zines refer to their offerings as "content." Around 1998, "content" was declared king and countless firms bought into the prevailing wisdom. In the end, the language failed those businesses.

Content, it was thought, would drive "sticky eyeballs" to web sites where they would form "communities" and view advertising, lots of advertising, to support the model. Unfortunately, the broad language of prevailing thought never delved into the specifics. What kind of "content" did people want? Journalism? Porn? Chat rooms? Flash-animated games? The result was BBQ.com, a site widely held up to ridicule now. The site offered plenty of "content" — recipes, lists of barbecue events, grilling advice and a restaurant locator. It also went bankrupt in the summer of 2000 after spending US$1.68 million in 11 months.

All content is not created equal, it turns out. People did not turn to the web for BBQ-related information, at least not in sufficient numbers to float a company. Few were willing to buy product in return for content they could view in a more compelling fashion in stores, on television, and in books. The language of business with its Newspeak term "content" didn’t lead to commercial success.

Rooting for Plain Language

Over the span of approximately five years, language used to describe technology ventures has become increasingly Orwellian, and the subsequent demise of the dot-com economy is no coincidence. Terms such as "content," "partnering," "solution," "architecting" to name a few were concocted to mask the missing element of buying and selling the products and services that people want. Trillions of dollars have vanished from the major exchanges as the former emperors of tech were laid bare in investors’ eyes.

In Newspeak, it became impossible to describe thought or emotion beyond "good" or "ungood." So, too, in the language of the technology business, we have stripped words of their meaning so that it becomes impossible to assign value or sell products, services and ideas. We have lost a lot of the language we need to effectively conduct business and speak to one another in creative fashion. New businesses are under pressure to use fashionable jargon that leaves them unable to differentiate themselves from other businesses or speak meaningfully to investors and customers. There isn’t a company on the technology market today that doesn’t describe itself as a "leading provider of e-business information solutions."

In the next few years, some firms will recover, and the language they use in the aftermath of the dot-com meltdown will be very different. They will emphasize that they sell products that do this or widgets that do that. They will not be afraid to use plain language to describe their products and services in terms that persuade others to act on that information. But until that day, the MBAs who have stripped language of its meaning will continue to drive their dot-com dreams into dust.

Jeff Leiper is an Ottawa-based technology business journalist and writer. He writes and edits for Decima Publishing Inc.’s Canadian NEW MEDIA, a trade publication covering the regulatory and business considerations surrounding convergent media.