OK people, listen up, I’ve got you all on my radar. Blue sky thinking, thinking outside the box and brainstorming have all circled the drain. Going forward in this space, we need to take an ideas shower and develop a holistic cradle-to-grave approach to the emerging paradigm.
The strategic staircase is long and steep but if we drill down and granularise our core competencies we can shorten the path to profitability. We must be more pro-active so I need 110 per cent support to put all my ducks in a row and avoid negative territory. Sales are up, but we can’t sit back on our laurels and guarantee ongoing multiple store-gasms. We need to gather the low-hanging fruit before the competition.
None of us is trying to reinvent the wheel, but there are no quick wins. Let’s connect ear-to-ear tomorrow to discuss how we can leverage our synergies in a real-time customisable platform.
For those of you playing Buzzword Bingo, you’ve probably got a full house. But why do some people feel the need to use buzz words and phrases rather than saying simply: “we need to work hard, together and to make fewer mistakes and more money”.? Which is what the previous three paragraphs actually meant.
Let’s unpack the reasons (sorry, another one slipped in). Euphemisms were originally adopted in the workplace to avoid saying something unpleasant or to deal with touchy subjects that made people feel uncomfortable.
Downsizing is much softer than sacking. “I’ll take that on board”
is nicer than “no”. “You need to come to my party” isn’t a polite invitation to a knees-up, it means simply “Do it my way”. “I need to get up to speed” means “I don’t know anything”, and “Let’s take this offline” means neither of us knows anything.
Mairi Damer of Word Up Communications thinks it’s amazing that business people fail to realise customers don’t speak or understand business jargon. She said: “Surely successful business is all about successful connections, and those are hard to achieve when you’re speaking in the business equivalent of Esperanto. Business needs to remember to talk to customers and clients in the language THEY speak, not incomprehensible flash-in-the-pan guff.”
Damer, above, has a way with words. A former journalist, it’s her job – she founded her company on how to use words effectively in business. She said: “The current overuse of words and expressions which imply deep integrity and honesty drives me clean off my head. Fair enough if a business comes clean about their desire to make shedloads of cash, but when they shroud the profit motive under a thin veneer of so-called ‘authenticity’, ‘value-driven goals’ or the ‘highest ethical standards’ they’re just taking the p***.”
“It’s all about status. Somehow people imagine that spouting all the latest lingo makes them look edgy, cool, super smart and one step ahead. It doesn’t, it just makes them look daft.”
Her advice to business? “It’s simple, stupid. Just speak human.”
Michelle Rodger is a communications consultant
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