Celebrating business jargon

I recently heard a piece on NPR, with FT columnist Lucy Kellaway, about the meaninglessness of many ubiquitous business phrases.  As self-appointed author of the Guff Awards, Lucy made some great and funny observations about dubious business usage of the English langage, like the ubiquitous phrase, "going forward."

I agree businesspeople speak far too much in the abstract, leaving their listeners wondering what the hell they're talking about--the cure for which can be found in Dan & Chip Heath's "Made to Stick", a great practical guide for anyone that has to communicate regularly in organizations.  The Heath brothers discuss Elizabeth Newton's Tappers & Listeners study, in which subjects were challenged to tap out a famous tune for a listener to guess.  The study showed that the tappers grossly overestimated the chances that listeners would correctly guess what they were tapping--a phenomenon that illustrates well the difficulty of communicating with others.

In Wharton professor Stuart Diamond's "Getting More", Diamond discusses the importance of "getting to" the pictures others have in their heads.  When I speak, I'm trying to use language to magically conjure the picture in my head in the heads of others.  Since I will always fail to some degree, understanding what is the picture is in their head is key.  The Heaths would, amongst other things, tell you to speak in specific rather than broad terms ("for the next year," vs. "going forward").

But I would like to very briefly stand up in defense of three kinds of universal business metaphor:

1) Sports - "Skating to where the puck is going to be"--Apparently a Wayne Gretsky quote, perhaps popularized as a business phrase by Steve Jobs, this colorful metaphor reflects not just the fact that competing in business involves chasing a moving target, but also that moving your organization is going to take time and effort, so staying one step ahead of--and occasionally stepping around--the competition is essential.

2) Driving - "Moving the needle"--For non-American speakers, the needle in question is the indicator hand of the speedometer--not to be confused with unrelated sewing or nursing analogies!  Frequently used in "what it'll take to move the needle," a phrase that efficiently evokes the value of achieving an incremental improvement in cycle time, and the need to quantify the required change in input to achieve that improvement.

3) Gastronomy - "Eating (someone else's) lunch"--I'm not sure I ever fully understood this phrase until I read in today's New York Times: "'Android and Apple together are eating BlackBerry’s lunch,' said Frank Gillett, a Forrester analyst."  The idea that you can do the hard work of packing your lunch and bringing it to school--in this case, creating the smartphone market--only for someone else to take away your rewards--is both insightful and motivating.

American business culture is full of these colorful metaphors.  I admit that, as an outsider, some of them can be confusing (I still have no idea what motherhood and apple pie is a reference to, and am about to go look it up!)  But if a picture paints a thousand words, then metaphors are a few words with the power of evoking a vivid picture in someone else's head.  Going forward I will aim to use them more!