Cliche cachet
You can't walk the business walk without talking the talk. But do those words have any meaning?
By ROBERT TRIGAUX
Published April 4, 2005
At the end of the day, there is nothing like a classic business cliche.
Companies thrive on cliches. Managers hide behind them. Employees gag on them. And, yes, business journalists try to avoid them, but often wallow in the hackneyed phrase anyway.
To be perfectly candid, business cliches are a robust, user-friendly and value-added solution for associates that can take corporate communications to the next level of thinking outside the box.
Come now, which of the following sentences would you rather read?
The company fired half its workers because nobody bought its product.
Or this far more eloquent obfuscation?
As part of its strategic vision, the company cited shifting demographic demand and variable inventory turnover as cyclical factors contributing to a mission-critical process of rightsizing.
Business-speak is full of jargon, buzzwords, meaningless phrases pretending to be English and cliches. Trite business cliches are the comfort food of Corporate America and, of course, it tends to overindulge. The result is a loss of clarity in what business is really trying to communicate.
I recall covering North Carolina banker Hugh McColl in the 1990s as he turned his modest NCNB into NationsBank and then into Bank of America. One day his bank had employees, just like any other bank. The next day, the bank started calling its employees "associates." (Was that a promotion? Do they get to become partners?) Alas, they still are called associates, and the silly term has spread across the industry.
Business cliches are proliferating, despite growing attempts to speak and write plain English. Part of the problem is the technology boom, which not only has multiplied tech jargon but allowed it to spread to the general business arena. That's how "bandwidth" morphed from a technical term about communications capacity to the broader meaning of not having enough "personal bandwidth" or time.
Another problem is globalization (another cliche), which means we are importing new cliches just as we export our own. Outsourcing, insourcing and flexsourcing are cliches in the making.
In the spirit of business clarity, I asked some area business educators, executives and professional communicators if any business cliches especially bugged them. The response was, well, enthusiastic.
"We are in the business of concept creation, so it's hard to criticize our own creations at times," acknowledges University of Tampa business school dean Joe McCann. "But even we have a few cliches that the business faculty has had enough of."
At the top of the UT hit list: "out of the box thinking." Asks McCann: "What box? Who put me in one?"
Other faculty favorites include "user friendly" and "value added." Explains McCann: "Everyone knows "user friendly' does not exist any more."
And why does value need to be added? "Shouldn't it have been there in the first place?"
University of South Florida's business dean in Tampa, Robert Anderson, says he would outlaw the term "branding" because it's become too confusing. He'd also do away with all the gibberish now used in place of the words fire and hire: Downsizing, upsizing and rightsizing.
Carol Steele, business development manager at USF's Center for Ocean Technology in St. Petersburg, zeroed in on one phrase she would love to ban. When people start talking about some complex process or issue, she says, they sometimes will burst out with this cliche: "We'll do X and Y, and then boom, boom, boom, it'll be finished!"
That's a shorthand way of suggesting that accomplishing a few simple upfront steps - then brushing off the harder stuff to follow - will yield a quick and successful result.
"I am no stranger to taking on complex, ill-defined projects, and liking that sort of thing," Steele says. "But to have the complexity completely trivialized or ignored leaves me a bit on edge."
Steele's not the only one bugged.
Robert Elek, Verizon spokesman in Tampa, has no taste for such cliches and buzzwords as "team" (that one, he says, "makes me nuts") or "interface" ("machines interface, people interact!"). To "socialize" or "populate" an idea, he says, are phrases that may "put you in the "corporate cool' crowd" but do nothing to really communicate what you mean.
Tampa business communications pro Beth Leytham names "multitasking" among her least admired cliches.
"Everyone that has a job or a life multitasks, but somehow it has come to be some badge of productivity," Leytham says. Just trying to live up to that cliche wastes productive time, she argues.
Suzie Boland, president of Tampa's RFB Communications Group and a prominent publicist of area technology firms, has a favorite cliche, too. "Solutions."
"No longer does a company need to be able to define what it does and the benefits it offers," she says. "Instead, it provides solutions! Never mind that they don't always know which problem they're solving."
Michelle Bauer and Peter Kageyama, the married marketing duo busy promoting technology and creative arts in this area, threw one of their cliche darts at "value proposition." Whatever happened to simply saying features and benefits?
Bauer bravely acknowledges she's been known to talk about taking anything "to the next level."
"I am guilty of this one and have resolved to banish it from my own speech," she says.
Bill Habermeyer, chief executive of Progress Energy Florida, agrees. "I'm probably guilty of using that cliche myself," he says. "Taking it to the next level" lacks meaning, Habermeyer argues. "It's too imprecise. It suggests a higher level of achievement but fails to define the goal."
Like crabgrass, cliches crop up despite efforts to eradicate them. While Habermeyer is diligently editing his language, his parent company still depends on cliche.
Consider this news release issued Thursday from company headquarters in Raleigh, N.C. (I've highlighted the best cliches.)
"Progress Energy released its 2004 annual report to shareholders today emphasizing the company's focus on sound strategy, steady execution and highlighting the company's leading efforts in economic development and community initiatives in its service areas."
It sounds good. But what does it mean? Not much.
What else would the company focus on? An unsound strategy? Shaky execution? Its trailing efforts?
Last year, an international survey by the Plain English Campaign sought the most irritating phrase in the language. The winner: "At the end of the day . . ."
In Michigan, Lake Superior State University maintains a list of overdone business cliches that range from "24/7" and "ballpark figure" to "it's not rocket science" and "pushing the envelope." The list is growing.
I have a few personal favorites.
I cringe every time I am officially told an executive is leaving a company "to pursue other interests." Talk about a catch-all cliche.
Then there is the kingpin cliche of business: "Cautiously optimistic."
Between 1990 through 1995, that phrase appeared 175 times in this newspaper. Between 2000 until Friday, with nine months to go this year, the phrase has shown up 209 times.
Does that make us more cautious or more optimistic than we used to be?
I am reminded of the 1988 baseball movie Bull Durham in which veteran catcher Crash Davis (played by Kevin Costner) counsels young hotshot pitcher "Nuke" LaLoosh (played by Tim Robbins) how to give an upbeat-sounding interview without really saying anything.
CRASH: Learn your cliches. Study them. Know them. They're your friends. (Crash hands Nuke a small pad and pen.) Write this down.
"We gotta play 'em one day at a time."
NUKE: Boring.
CRASH: Of course. That's the point.
The business community learned that lesson a long, long time ago.
Robert Trigaux can be reached at 727 893-8405 or trigaux@sptimes.com