The topic for this post was suggested to me by a good friend over in Europe, Codrin. I don’t know why I hadn’t leveraged his input for my own continuous improvement in the past. He indicated that there was a synergy of our ideas where I could take advantage of some low hanging fruit and get some quick wins. Since he considered himself a stakeholder and influencer in my blogging process he thought I should outsource some of my ideation process whereby a consensus for topic creation could be leveraged. This could in turn create a new best practice and benchmark for future cross functional team blog topic empowerment.

Goodness, this could be worse than even I suspected.

This is going to be something of an interesting analysis as far as topics goes. Some of you may look at that introduction and say that there is nothing wrong with it. The rest of you will probably have had the needle on your Business Jargon Overdose meter pegged at the “red line”, and quite possibly could have broken the meter all together. Whenever I find myself in a business jargon overdose state I find that the best cure for me is to go listen to music (usually either alternative rock or jazz, depending on my frustration level) until my fists unclench. As this condition seems to be occurring with ever greater regularity I seem to have acquired a significant music library.

For the purposes of the remainder of this discussion I will use the terms Business Jargon and Business Slang (BS) interchangeably. Being a product of the business technology acronym generation I find myself being a little more comfortable and potentially more accurate, in referring to the latest business technology generated buzz words by the acronym “BS” rather than by their jargon related acronym counterpart.

Business, especially the high technology business used to be ruled by the use of the acronym. There were financial based acronyms such as ROI (Return on Investment) or NPV (Net Present Value) and there were technology based acronyms such as CPU and RAM and PROM and the like (I know I have dated myself through the selection of technology acronyms. As I have said many times, I am somewhat “old school” in orientation.) The point here is that these acronyms meant something. They were shortened names for actual formulas and physical devices. They represented real things and as such had a real value.

When we fast forward to the business of today we seem to have replaced our quantitative value acronyms with the much more malleable business jargon, lingo and slang of today. As such it seems that the value of our business communication has also decreased in accordance with the utilization of these BS terms. I’ll pick on a few of my favorites.

Synergy. Really? I understand the concept where the combination of multiple elements creates an end state that is greater than the sum of the individual elements. I got it. I think everyone else gets it too. However, we were all taught early on in our school careers that one plus one does not in fact equal three. To hear people talk today it seems that all we need to do to improve our business, increase our profits, reduce costs or cure baldness is combine some disparate people, jobs and functions and we will miraculously get more out of it than we put in. Not every combination creates synergy. Some things do, others don’t. As an example, I like beer and I like ice cream. I don’t think I will create synergy and get something I like even better if I combine beer and ice cream.

Wait a minute. That one might actually work.

Cross Functional. Come on. This one along with consensus, empower and transformative combine to make any written communication appear both longer and more important. Mostly just longer. It seems it is almost impossible to see only one of these words used in its literal form in any form of communication. That would be the metaphysical equivalent of hearing the sound of one hand clapping. What we now seem to end up with is: “We need to empower a cross functional team to reach consensus on our transformative plans.”

Can’t we just say that we need to get together to figure out what to do next?

Customer Centric / Focused / Voice / Satisfaction: Incredible. The last time I looked just about every business on the planet was in business to sell some sort of goods, products or services to a customer. Now the definition of whom or what a customer is can vary from business to business, but the concept of providing a customer something of value and in return the customer giving you money is the basic precept of business. Everything that the business does needs to be focused at providing the customer something and getting them to give you their money. There is a definition for people in businesses that are not directly involved with either providing the customer their desired “something” or getting the customer to give you money. These people are called “overhead”. They are also the ones most prone to using these types of customer related phrases.

Anyone who uses the phrase “customer centric” is usually not.

Paradigm Shift: I don’t even know what to say here. This one seems to be utilized along with such ideological jewels as Best Practices, Benchmarking and Continuous Improvement. Everyone from Charles Darwin in the Origin of Species (things evolve and change, to paraphrase) to Woody Allen in Annie Hall (things, like sharks keep moving forward or die, again a paraphrase) has said that things change. Things that were once done one way are now done another. This is the essence of the meaning of a “paradigm shift”. Nothing ever stays the same. We might like it to, but it won’t. If we just get used to this fact perhaps we can do away with these repetitively redundant descriptions for change.

Robert Heinlein said: “We live and learn, or we don’t live long.” I guess this applies to businesses as well.

As difficult as it may be to believe I have actually been accused of not being either politically correct or a team player. It could be because I don’t normally seek a transformative transparency in looking to create consensus. I don’t think that we probably need to incentivize employee stakeholders and influencers when we are looking at the value add of any presentation or proposal. It seems that my problem may actually be that I do not know how to fully leverage the cloud, fully take advantage of virtualization or deliver anything as a service.

On the other hand it could be that I don’t believe in utilizing the current iteration of Business Slang that is being passed as intelligent and useful business communication.

I think we need to remove the BS (Business Slang) from the business vernacular, and get back to simple ideas of making things, selling things and delivering things when we communicate with each other. It will help get things done.

In other words, let’s eschew obfuscation.