“Geyer Global Partners helps you to leverage your company’s core
competencies to gain traction in the monetization of the North American
marketplace through the incentivization of global deliverables by providing seamless
turnkey solutions to your international value proposition.”
Are you impressed yet?
As any professional should do from time to time, I have been
spending time lately looking at materials put out by other consultants in my
field. In particular, I have been trying
to conduct some intelligence on: Who are my competitors? Who offers potentially complementary
services? Are other consultants doing
things that I can learn from (either good things or bad things)? Conducting
this research has been a useful enterprise, in that it helps to focus the mind
on new ways in which consultants can assist in the professional development of
their clients. It is equally useful in
that it points out ways in which professionals in North American business use
their own peculiar language – what I will call “business jargon” – to
communicate with each other or, in some cases, to avoid communicating with each other.
It has unfortunately become an article of faith among
graduates of American business schools that the successful and liberal
application of business jargon is a reliable indicator of having understood the
subject matter. In other words, if you
can use words and phrases that have no coherent meaning outside of business,
you must have actually paid attention during those long management
lectures. Even better, so the thinking
goes, if a manager can liberally season his reports with jargon that even most
clients or colleagues cannot understand, it somehow justifies that manager’s
salary.
The drawbacks of this approach to the use of language should
be obvious. Certainly, each profession
has its own jargon. Software engineers
or mechanical engineers talking among themselves are completely unintelligible
to a person who is not a software or a mechanical engineer. For years I worked as a business appraiser,
and I could have conversations with other business appraisers about
depreciation curves and approaches to the determination of enterprise value
that would leave a typical listener in desperate need of a copy of the USPAP[1]
glossary and a stiff drink. But the role
of a manager is to lead and to communicate with people with a wide variety of
backgrounds. As such, managers need to
be able to communicate in ways that are clear and that avoid unnecessary jargon.
To be honest, I think that managers insist on using business
jargon for one of two reasons. The more
charitable reason is that this is the lingua
franca of the universe of professional “business” as taught in American
business schools. Business jargon is the
language that is used among peers within and between department heads all the
way up to executive suites, so this is naturally the language that seeps into every
day communication with customers and partners.
I myself have tried to banish as much business jargon from this blog as
I can, with only middling results, because it becomes a part of how you frame
your worldview. The less charitable
reason for using business jargon is that it provides the manager a shield and plausible
deniability if their advice or leadership turns out to be pointing their company
in the wrong direction. The manager can
use business jargon to sound intelligent, but when things go wrong, they can
then claim that their subordinate, their superiors, or their partners did not
understand the nuances of their recommendations. I have an MBA, have worked as a consultant
for almost 20 years, and can speak business jargon with the best of them. I have read dozens of reports (and publicity
materials in brochures and websites) that have been nothing more than
meaningless gibberish, designed only to make one party sound smart and
everybody else feel stupid by comparison.
Whether we take the charitable view or the uncharitable
view, the partner or subordinate is the one who is at a disadvantage. If a partner or a subordinate stands up and
says that he does not understand the recommendations of a manager’s report, he
opens himself up to the ridicule of his peers – or worse, of his superiors (who may not understand the
report either). If that partner or subordinate
does not stand up and say that he
does not understand the manager’s recommendations, he may end up following
poorly conceived advice that is a bad fit for his organization.
When you consider companies seeking to expand overseas,
issues of language and understanding become particularly acute. Everybody wants to work with partners that
have impressive sounding managers, but if the expanding company and their
partner cannot communicate with each other in a way that is mutually
understandable, no amount of impressive sounding language is going to provide
the company with value for their money.
It is essential that both the expanding company and its
partners to clearly communicate their needs and their strategies to each other
if their work together is to be successful.
Potential partners need to understand that managers at expanding
companies may be speaking English as a second language, may not have attended
an American business school, and may not understand implicit cultural
references entwined within certain turns of phrase. By the same token, it is also essential that expanding
companies be willing to tell potential partners that their goals and strategies
are unclear. Even more importantly, it
is essential that expanding companies know whether the business jargon being
thrown at them by potential partners actually makes sense, or is just an effort
to obscure the fact that the potential partner has nothing of value to offer.
For more information on how Geyer Global Partners can help your business to "Go Global," visit our website at www.geyerglobal.de.
For more information on how Geyer Global Partners can help your business to "Go Global," visit our website at www.geyerglobal.de.
