Proud of his accession to an exalted level of exponential dimensioning of his speech patterns?
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Absurdly Driven looks at the world of business with a skeptical eye and a firmly rooted tongue in cheek.
Apparently, everything’s moving to video these days.
If Mark Zuckerberg says so, it must be true.
It’s astonishing, then, that words still seem to matter so much.
There are times when I hear certain people — business types, usually — talk such balderdashy gobbledygook that I sincerely wish they were jargon with the wind.
I was moved, therefore, by the Financial Times’ Lucy Kellaway, who just emitted 25 years of frustration at listening to “business people talking rot.”
She seems sad that she’s become numb to it all.
Each business jargon phrase, you see, is composed not of syllables, but codswallop cockroaches.
You can’t kill them. On bad days, you even end up letting your own codswallop cockroaches come out to play.
Kellaway did, however, nominate a worst offender.
“Howard Schultz is a champion in the bullshit space,” she said.
She singled out his promise that Starbucks was “delivering an immersive, ultra-premium, coffee-forward experience.”
“In this ultra-premium, jargon-forward twaddle,” she said, “the only acceptable word is ‘an.'”
It seems, at times, that business people and their PR attachés revel in inventing new phrases specifically designed to sound both novel and nauseating.
Kellaway picked out another Schulzian gem.
Asked whether Starbucks was about to buy another company, its then-CEO replied: “I would say that we have enough to digest in the near-term, and there’s nothing candidly in our sightline that would suggest that we’re involved in engaging anything that we’re going to acquire.”
That’s likely to give me enough indigestion in the medium-term.
The question is whether Schultz’s body of work is more fragrantly bullshitty than any single mauvais mot from other captains of industrial waste.
My own current favorites include this, uttered by American Airlines’ CEO Doug Parker.
Speaking of shoveling more seats inside his company’s smaller planes, he declared this represented the pursuit of “narrow-body density opportunities.”
It surely took an especially narrow-bodied, dense human being to create that set of words.
And then there was Under Armour CEO Kevin Plank.
This is how he described the abject business performance of the Curry 3 shoe: “And while the 3 played very well on court for Stephen Curry and our athletes, a sluggish signature market and a warm consumer reception led to softer-than-expected results.”
“A warm consumer reception” actually means “a really terrible, no good, very bad, I-wanted-to-scream-in-pain” kind of reception.
Somehow, I find a cultural explanation for Schultz’s verbal vongole.
It’s born of a certain West Coast desperation to find (far too many) nice-sounding words, in order to say something that may not be so terribly nice or interesting.
When I first arrived in America, I was in a meeting with Microsoft when an executive said: “This is a challenging situation.”
A what?
Being new and, well, amused, I replied: “Oh, you mean we’re in deep doo-doo?”
No, I didn’t actually say that. Well, not the doo-doo part. I was trying to make you think (slightly) better of me.
Just as the Brits have always tried to find terribly polite ways to express the frightfully disastrous (Disclosure: I grew up there), so the Nouveau Regime of the West Coast has come up with its own version of politesse oblige.
Sadly, this has been co-opted by other parts of the world — the East Coast, for example.
Which leads to hardy Marylanders like Plank spin the sort of guff normally uttered by those who live within hiking distance of Birkenstock’s HQ. (Yes, it’s not far from my house.)
I think this linguistic approach has a certain sub-optimality that could be enhanced by rigorous and constant iteration in order to ascend aural acceptability scales and de-emphasize potential frictions in the listener marketplace.
The opinions expressed here by Inc.com columnists are their own, not those of Inc.com.