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The Obscurity Trap
I notice that you use plain, simple language, short words and brief sentences. That is the way to write Englishâit is the modern way and the best way. Stick to it; donât let fluff and flowers and verbosity creep in.
âMARK TWAIN
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THE FOG OF BUSINESS
Enronâs performance in 2000 was a success by any measure, as we continued to outdistance the competition and solidify our leadership in each of our major businesses. We have robust networks of strategic assets that we own or have contractual access to, which give us greater flexibility and speed to reliably deliver widespread logistical solutions . . . . We have metamorphosed from an asset-based pipeline and power generating company to a marketing and logistics company whose biggest assets are its well-established business approach and its innovative people.
âENRON ANNUAL REPORT, 2000
Unless a businessperson gets cornered into speaking directly to live peopleâsay English teachers bearing assault riflesâwe know what to expect: an indigestible main course of catchphrases and endless prose, with not a lot of substance for dessert.
Jargon, wordiness, and evasiveness are the active ingredients of modern business-speak, and they make up the Obscurity Trap. This trap is particularly pervasive, and its perpetrators are evil people who want to destroy civilization as we know it. (Well, okay, not really, but it felt good to get that out.) We call this a trap because the people who spew jargon and all of that evasiveness really arenât evil at all.
Theyâre us.
In normal, healthy conversations with their friends, spouse, cat, and Porsche, these people are brilliant communicators. Ask them to give a presentation or write a press release, though, and say hello to Mr. Hyde. Out comes the 80-page presentation about âsynergistic alliancesâ and âgo-forward engagement processes.â And all of this goes right the past the audience, so the lonely yet meaningful point on slide No. 78 doesnât have a chance of getting through.
And it isnât just a matter of spending more time and effort. Consider the press release. Almost nothing goes through more editing and review cycles than a press release, which has to be short and is written for the world at large. And yet, press releases seem to show that the more time that is spent on a message, the worse it gets. Shown (p. 13) is an excerpt from an IBM press release.
If you were to take a red marker and cross out the acronyms and meaningless jargon in this press release, the next person who walked by would probably call for an ambulance, because it would look as if you were bleeding all over the page. Once again, hereâs a smart and respected firm in technology services that canât break away from clichĂ©s or corporate-speak long enough to tell us anything understandable.
The Obscurity Trap is a serious problem for anyone who wants to connect with a reader or audience: nature has given us the ability to ignore all of this stuff, and we ignore it all the time. Just as you donât put much thought into walking or breathing, you dismiss the empty or contrived calories of modern business communications without disturbing many slumbering brain cells. And if you tune them out, you can bet your audience does, too.
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THE ROOTS OF OBSCURITY
If the Obscurity Trap is all about jargon, wordiness, and evasive language, itâs fair to ask why otherwise decent people feel the need to torture their colleagues. There are external forcesâpolitical correctness, risk management, and the herd mentality. But there are more insipid, internal factors at work as well.
ME, ME, AND â COME TO THINK OF IT â ME
The first reason for obscurity is a business idiotâs focus on himself over the reader. In the IBM press release, jargon and acronyms serve the author, not the hapless reader who is supposed to get some meaning from it.
When obscurity pollutes someoneâs communications, itâs often because the authorâs goal is to impress and not to inform. The low road to impressing an audience is to make them feel inferior, by using words they wonât understand. So a fallback plan when trying to impress (or when you have nothing to say) is to toss in a few ringers like âvalue proposition,â âmindshare,â and âecosystem.â This way, the author seems to be a kind of intellectual powerhouse, generating concepts that are too lofty to be expressed in something as mundane as English. Thereâs a strange insecurity at work here, where someone tries to overcompensate by trying to sound smart.
PERVASIVENESS OF EVASIVENESS
A second reason people fall into the Obscurity Trap, and ultimately speak like idiots, is a fear of concrete language.
In business, we like to avoid commitment. Liability scares us, so we add endless phrases to qualify our views on a topic, acknowledging everything from prevailing weather conditions, to the twelve reasons we canât make a decision now, to the reason we all agree the topic is important, to the reason why decisions in general require a lot of thought, and so on.
As a study in contrast, consider wedding vows, with the traditional âI do.â Two short words, nowhere to hide. No qualifying clauses, no royal âweâ to relieve individual accountability. Just I promising to do.
A lot of the Obscurity Trap stems from evasiveness. If you donât want to say anything, youâll find a way to say nothing in a lot of words. Readers will recognize this and give up looking for meaning.
ROMANCING THE DULL: MIAMI RECEIVABLES
The third motive for obscurity is business idiotsâ relentless attempt to romanticize whatever it is that they do for a living. All of this romanticizing keeps the business world from talking about work and instead allows business idiots to pretend to be secret agents and quarterbacks.
When it comes to careers, there are basically two kinds of people in the world. The first kind can mention their career at a cocktail party and count on being swarmed by people who want to know what itâs really like. If youâre an international spy, actor, or sports star, you have what doctorates in the career sciences call a âcool job.â
For most of us, though, fame isnât part of the job description. We get e-mail, send e-mail, detach things from e-mail, save those things, read them, and make some edits. Sometimes we file them or make copies of them so we donât lose them. We share them with other people who change the format of these things and show them to groups of other people. We stow things away for a while. Then we retrieve them and take little parts of them and put them into bigger files, where they become part of what we call âintellectual capitalâ (because we donât want to call them âbigger filesâ).
Our friend Avril Dell, a consultant based in Canada, put it bluntly: Business is dull, and thatâs why weâve yet to see a television drama along the lines of âMiami Receivables.â It isnât hard to see her point. We tried, though:
Palm trees sway in front of a sleek glass office building. A tan stud in a five-figure suit hands the Ferrari keys to the valet, sweeps into the office, winks at the supermodel whoâs temping as the receptionist between Sports Illustra...