King Marketing

That little gem of opaque prose comes to us courtesy of General Electric chairman Jeff Immelt.

The problem is, it could have come from any company. There’s no voice, no personality. Worse, there’s a lot of words there, but very little is actually being said.

It’s doubly ironic in this case, because Immelt’s own story is inspirational. He’s the CEO who, after a terrible year that nearly resulted in his dismissal, turned GE around by emphasizing the need for imagination and simplification.

The message didn’t get to the GE copywriters, apparently. This is why bad business writing does no one any service.

I quickly dashed off the beginnings of how it might sound if Immelt was speaking to a group of GE managers and employees at an event of intimate, even small scale:

“GE’s been around a long time and we’ve seen a lot. We’ve invented not only new things, but new ways of doing business that other companies admire and emulate. And we’re known for delivering what we promise. That doesn’t mean we’ll always be #1, though. If we want to stay at the top, we have to keep on delivering, because our reputation depends on it…”

If you heard someone deliver something like that, with intensity, passion and conviction - well, you’d become a True Believer, wouldn’t you?

In my former life, putting together specialty magazines, I had to read a few thousand press releases a year. I’m sure that no human being (or even an Oompa-Loompa) had worked on them - they were written by pod people - maybe even by those zombie clone models they use in corporate stock photography.

At another employer, I remember endless rounds of rewrites where I’d take all the corporate-speak out of the sell sheets and press releases, and the management would put it all back in because they were afraid of sounding “unprofessional.” Well, call me an enthusiastic amateur any day, but isn’t the point of a press release to stand out, not to blend in?

In the bowels of another Major Corporation, I remember being lectured by a mid-level marketroid from Intel - one of the “Lisas from Marketing” that Douglas Coupland sends up so well in Microserfs - on the proper use of the Intel Inside logo.

It was flabbergasting: it was as if she had memorized the entire Intel Book of Legal Disclaimers Volumes I-IX and could recite them at will. Her tone was pitched somewhere between cult recruiter and someone about to have a nervous breakdown. It was this hapless woman’s job to indoctrinate people in corporatespeak, and it was clearly having some sort of effect on her sanity.

She gave us an embarrassingly easy quiz at the end and our prize was a stuffed Intel Bunny Man doll — which my cubiclemates promptly studded with straight pins and turned into a voodoo effigy.

An entirely human, visceral response to corporate bull, if you ask me.

Deloitte and Touche - who, during the gung-ho 90s, spawned many of the more laughable examples of corporatespeak - at least took responsibility for their monster. They put together an in-house team that created Bullfighter, a plugin for Word that sends up a flare if you use “leverage,” “synergy,” and “competency” in the same sentence.

The Bullfighter team spun off into their own organization, and this year (2005) they published Why Business People Speak Like Idiots. Going beyond a mere catalogue of amusing foibles, or prescribing stern grammatical rules, this book actually explores the psychological roots of the problem: fear.

According to writers Brian Fugere, Chelsea Hardaway and Jon Warshawsky, bad business writing aims to be obscure and anonymous, uses ineffective sales tactics, and bores the reader - because it’s an expression of fear, much like a squid releasing a cloud of ink. Businesspeople are afraid to be direct, committed, to expose themselves to risk or to fall flat on their face, to acknowledge that they are human.

Avoiding the anonymity trap is all about making a personal connection with your audience. Templates are your enemy. Humor is your ally. At some basic level, though, the audience is going to decide whether you actually care about the topic or are simply standing there to read from a script.

The polish we apply to all our performances is one of the downfalls of business presentations. Whatever efficiencies come from cue cards, notes or scripts, they make it obvious that what we’re saying is coming from the page rather than from our brains. The listener knows that this presentation is a one-sided experience - it’s a repackaging of pre-digested ideas and facts that have been filtered of emotion for public consumption. What people really cherish are those unplanned moments - the authentic stuff that happens in live events.

If your company’s drowning in bull, which no doubt it is, you owe it to yourself and your co-workers to check out the Bullfighters’ book, pronto.

I’ll be returning to this topic more specifically and in more depth over the weeks to come. In the meantime…tell me your corporatespeak horror stories…Ever had to write it? Even scarier - have you ever had to present a PowerPoint full of it?

As Stan Lee would say: EXCELSIOR!

*Minor rant: Why do the marketers of books placed in the Fiction section at Chapters feel the need to add “A Novel” on their covers? How dumb do they think we are?