The Think Room

Kudos to Harvard Business Review Contributor Dan Pallotta for a very funny, very necessary diatribe on the epidemic of business gibberish.

"When I was younger, if I didn’t understand what people were saying, I thought I was stupid," he writes. "Now I realize that if it's to people's benefit that I understand them but I don't, then they’re the ones who are stupid."

Truer words have rarely been written. And, while Pallotta blames "the language of internet business models" for the epidemic, this has long been an inexplicable plague on all forms of marketing, which is a pretty simple business that shouldn’t be hard to explain in simple terms.

I remember being a young(er) reporter at Advertising Age years ago and routinely feeling embarrassed by not being able to understand the alphabet soup of acronyms and clichés that routinely crossed the lips of CMOs and agency types. I would talk to people at media agencies and often wonder if I was in the right line of work.

And then, as I spent more time on the beat and began to understand the field a bit better, I started to realize that it wasn't me, it was them. One publicly traded media company announced a new venture in such bizarrely opaque terms that my old boss, Jonah Bloom, wondered aloud if the business in question was a "jargon-creation agency." The acronyms and clichés weren't signs of sophistication, they were obscuring the fact that the folks who wrote the release didn't understand the business they were attempting to describe.

Around the same time, I met one of the founders of a major, multinational media agency, and was surprised to find that, as he discussed his business, he didn't use the gibberish so many of his underlings did. He understood the business well enough to describe it in English.

From that moment on, it occurred to me that people who threw business jargon around to appear knowledgeable were frequently compensating for the reality that they were anything but.

So, at the risk of being cliché in a column railing against them, we at Olson PR propose eliminating the following expressions from our industry in the year ahead:

We resolve to not say "robust ideation" when we mean "think about."

We resolve to not refer to a "Zero Moment of Truth" when we mean "store."

We will also not use acronyms without first referring to what they actually mean, and we will also not use the phrase "fishing where the fish are," because that's just stupid.

Happy new year, indeed.

Full disclosure: Olson's Adam Selwyn contributed (the funniest parts) to this post.