Business-As-Usual Now Closed

A couple of valuable thoughts from The Cluetrain Manifesto which you can now read online for free.

• In just a few more years, the current homogenized “voice” of business – the sound of mission statements and brochures – will seem as contrived and artificial as the language of the 18th century French court.
• Already, companies that speak in the language of the pitch, the dog-and-pony show, are no longer speaking to anyone.
• Companies need to realize their markets are often laughing. At them.
• Bombastic boasts – “We are positioned to become the preeminent provider of XYZ” – do not constitute a position.
• Command-and-control management styles both derive from and reinforce bureaucracy, power tripping and an overall culture of paranoia.
• The inflated self-important jargon you sling around – in the press, at your conferences – what’s that got to do with us?

The last one if my favorite. I have come to see the meaningless, self-gratifying mumbo-jumbo of corporate speak in a different light. I’ve come to despise it. The Cluetrain authors call it TechnoLatin:

[TechnoLatin is] a vocabulary of vague but precise-sounding words that work like the blank tiles in Scrabble: you can use them anywhere, but they have no value. TechnoLatin takes perfectly meaningful words and empties them. If language is a living organism, TechnoLatin words are like those pod people in the movie Invasion of the Body Snatchers. They look real, but they are not. And like the pod people, TechnoLatin has become the norm. Clarity is the exception when it should be the rule.

Today we no longer make chips, circuit boards, computers, monitors, or printers. We don’t even make products. Instead we make solutions, a fatuous noun further bloated by empty modifiers such as total, full, seamless, industry standard, and state-of-the-art.

It’s sad to see an occasional small company—off to a good start at first—forget its roots and spew “self-important jargon” of producing the best-in-the-world product; hiring a team of “industry experts” and summing up their total experience years into some arbitrary number; “professionally promoting unique information to exceed customer expectations,” etc.

Ninety six years of combined experience? How do you slice it? And most important: what’s in it for me, a person on the outside of your business? You got it—nothing.

The more you talk about yourself, pad yourself on the back, and beat yourself in the chest, the less I want to listen. Or, as a corollary, the more I get pissed off at your ramblings. Show me the beef.

I’m hoping more and more companies finally understand they need a human voice. People have learned to gauge corporate BS quite well. “Business as usual” doesn’t fly anymore. And that’s a good thing!