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Business Jargon Is Not a “Value-Add”
Dan Pallotta, president of Advertising for Humanity and author of “Uncharitable.”
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An interview with Dan Pallotta, president of Advertising for Humanity and author of Uncharitable. For more, see his blog on hbr.org.
SARAH GREEN: Welcome to the HBR IdeaCast from Harvard Business Review. I’m Sarah Green. Let me run this idea up the flag pole. Business jargon is not a value add. Meaningless words don’t leverage cross-silo synergies, and a lot of key stakeholders would like to move forward and reach out to the low-hanging fruit of using words that actually mean something. We take this discussion offline today with Dan Pallotta, the president of Advertising for Humanity. He blogs for hbr.org and is the author of the book Uncharitable. Dan, thanks for firewalling off some time today to think outside the box.
DAN PALLOTTA: My pleasure. What does that mean?
SARAH GREEN: Exactly. Exactly. You wrote a blog post about this problem for hbr.org called, I don’t know what anyone is saying anymore, and it quickly broke our all time record for comments on a single blog post and broke some traffic records, too. So clearly, this is an issue that resonates with people. At the same time, we’re all guilty of using jargon. So why does this problem stick with us, even though we might hate ourselves for contributing to it?
DAN PALLOTTA: I think it’s become a habit for us. I find myself doing it from time to time, and it takes a lot of discipline for me to speak in plain English and not to lapse into that myself. I think at a deeper level, people feel like they have to talk that way.
I think there are a lot of inferiority complexes. I think people have a punishing voice in their heads that tells them they’re dumb, and so we try to mimic the things we hear other people say because we think they’re smarter than us. And it’s not even so much coming from an egotistical place. It’s coming from just wanting to meet the threshold of what’s considered intelligent business vernacular.
SARAH GREEN: There is some benefit I can see to be gained, in that using jargon makes you sound like an insider. A certain group of your peers will be impressed by it. But I could see that there would be a certain benefit to be gained by talking in the jargon of your peer group. But do you think that the costs outweigh those benefits?
DAN PALLOTTA: I think the costs to society outweigh the benefits. And I’m not so sure I’m that cynical about it. I don’t know if people actually strategize to talk this way as a way of making more money or being perceived as specialists in their area. My perception is that it’s less conscious than that. It’s less deliberate than that.
I was speaking to someone on the phone the other day after I wrote this blog, and she was talking about children in the preschool space. They have a new media company that is around– I’m quoting her– around the idea of children in the preschool space. And I said, what does that mean? What does that mean, children in the preschool space?
And she said, well– and she didn’t know what I was asking her. She got intimidated. She said, well I mean, I mean children in the preschool arena.
And I said, you mean preschoolers? Yeah, that’s right. But she couldn’t say it. She didn’t know that she had permission to say it.
And then my partner, that same night– our kid– we have triplets, and they’re four years old, and they go to the Eliot-Pearson school at Tufts– and he came back from a meeting there where they were talking about intergenerational communication. And he was laughing ’cause he had just read my blog, and he said, basically, it’s about how to talk to your kids.
And then they had another section called intercultural communication. And I thought, well, I don’t know, what is that, Caucasians talking to Latinos? No, that’s about talking to your in-laws.
But why do we put these barriers up that prevents us from actually understanding anything? And then of course, a lot of the comments that people made on the blog were accurate, and they said I think it’s a deeper problem than people not knowing how to talk. People don’t know how to think, or they’re not thinking. It’s maybe not so much that they don’t know how to think, but they don’t think. Because if you think about what you’re saying while you’re saying it, you don’t use those kinds of phrases ’cause you realize they’re meaningless.
SARAH GREEN: Well, and it may be– I’m just speculating here– but I could see that in some cases, you would want to use meaningless jargon ’cause it distances you from something that may be unappealing. So maybe we talk about things and we’re tempted to use those abstract words ’cause we don’t want to say exactly what we’re doing, or we want to make it sound a little more interesting or sexy.
DAN PALLOTTA: Yeah, and you hit on an important point there. I think, fundamentally, people don’t want to commit to things, and clever language can give the appearance that you’ve just said something that passes the red face test when, in fact, if you really dig into it, it doesn’t, because I asked you a straight-on question about whether you want to do this or not and you couldn’t say yes or no. You said something that sounded a lot smarter than yes or no, but actually it was dancing around the question.
You think about it. If you look at your parents, would your parents ever talk this way? My mother is a smart woman. I’ve never once heard her utter the word, “space” or “around.” She wouldn’t say, well, I’m cooking some dinner in the Italian space around sauce and meatballs. She would just never say anything like that. So I think going back to our parents and the way they spoke is a good way to break out of this habit. But people were just– I think they were just more plain-spoken.
SARAH GREEN: Well, I want to just play devil’s advocate here a little bit, because in some sense we have to admit that we’ve shifted from a very concrete economy, where we did things like make doorknobs and then sell doorknobs, to an economy where we’re not always sure what we’re doing, where we do things like we facilitate end-to-end customer solutions. I know a lot of people who, when they hear that someone’s a product manager or a consultant, they’re like, well, would do you do actually? So is it partly just that the nature of business itself has become more abstract?
DAN PALLOTTA: Well, the ability to accurately summarize something is valuable, but to the extent a person only speaks at the level of summary and category, then it becomes problematic. So it’s fine to say, we facilitate end-to-end customer solutions– I think that’s what you just said– and what that means is, for example, we do something like this. But when you just leave it at that, then I don’t think your communication has very much value.
And if I’ve never heard that phrase before, and you utter it, and then you’re onto the next sentence, I don’t have any time to even try to think about what it means. And I had time to think about what it means, like if you said we facilitate end-to-end customer solutions, and then you gave me 120 seconds to contemplate the meaning of that, I might be able to. But when you’ve rushed right into your next sentence– so the answer to your question is, yeah, I do think that this new economy presents language challenges for us. But that doesn’t mean that we need to be unconscious about that fact and be lazy in our communication.
And there might even be a deeper issue. One of the commenters said, the reason we have all this fancy language is we’re trying to describe all these things we don’t understand. We used to actually make things. Now we don’t make things anymore. And at a deeper level, you wonder how can we actually build an economy on social networking? At some point, somebody needs to produce food and doorknobs.
SARAH GREEN: Yeah, I wonder how much of it is just that our language is not keeping pace with the rate of change, or to go back to your comment about it being a bad habit, how much of our habits we just need to put a little more energy into fighting against, perhaps?
DAN PALLOTTA: Yeah, and I think it also– it relates to values as well, and it relates to principles. I think the language we use is a symptom of deeper things. Someone commented about double speak.
When you get on hold with one of the airlines, or Dell Computer, and they keep saying, we appreciate your patience, well, I don’t have any choice. I’m actually not being patient. You wouldn’t appreciate me if you heard what I’m saying to you.
Or your call is important to us. Well, no, it obviously isn’t. It obviously is not, ’cause I’ve been on hold for 50 minutes. So the language actually is the surface symptom for a lack of love. You don’t really love me.
Apple loves me. Apple loves me. They totally love me. They don’t say stuff like that. And they tell me how long I’m going to be on hold, and they usually pick up within four minutes.
But you– unh-uh. I’m not seeing any love, and that’s a much deeper issue. Do you really care about other human beings? Because if you really care about other human beings, and you really care about the experience they’re having, and you really care about the interruption or the frustration that you’re creating in their day, then you don’t create it.
Seth Godin has this great slide show where he puts together all these ridiculous signs, like where there was a huge problem, and instead of solving the problem, someone put up a sign to say, there’s a problem. So I send him pictures once in a while, and I sent him one last winter, beware, large, dangerous icicles overhead. OK. What you could do is actually clear the icicles away, and then there wouldn’t be a need for that sign.
Or in the Boston Public Gardens parking garage, beware, this door slams open at high speed when the ventilator system is on. Well, that’s like a $17 way of– you didn’t actually address that problem, and the sign doesn’t mean you addressed it. Similarly, telling me that– you think because you said your call is important to me, you just solved the problem. Well, no, you didn’t. You totally didn’t.
SARAH GREEN: It’s funny, and that’s interesting. I feel like I’m almost back in my semiotics class at Brown, talking about words, and what they represent, and what they mean. But in a way, I feel like what you’re saying is that if we can’t talk about how we’re working and what we’re producing using real words that clearly show how we benefit people, then maybe what we’re producing isn’t actually that meaningful.
DAN PALLOTTA: Yeah, absolutely. And ultimately, people have to look at what satisfies them. Personally, if I’m not producing something that has value in the world, I’m just deeply dissatisfied in my soul.
SARAH GREEN: So I want to end by asking you, what is your desire and call to action here? You have reached a point in your career where you can raise your hand in a meeting and just say, I’m sorry, I don’t understand what you just said, whereas other people may feel that they’re not at a point in their careers yet where they can safely do that. So but in your Dan Pallotta’s perfect world, what’s the takeaway from this, if I can be excused for using that phrase?
DAN PALLOTTA: Well, I think people just need to be more authentic to themselves on both sides of it, not only speak authentically, say what it is you really mean. If what you really mean is we don’t have anywhere near the resources that we need to pick up the phone calls, customers would appreciate that so much more. If United Airlines ran a recording that said, we’re so sorry, but we are so overloaded, and it costs us so much money to respond to phone calls. We’re doing the best we can, but you’re probably going to be on hold for 65 minutes, I would appreciate that so much more than your call is important to us and someone will be right with you.
So I think we need to be more authentic to ourselves, and ultimately, we need to have some courage. If you don’t understand what someone said, in a nice way, tell them that. And do you really want to work at a place, do you really want to devote your life to an enterprise that says things that you don’t understand? And do you want to enable that kind of behavior by shutting up every time, by being silent every single time they say something nonsensical? Because you’re totally enabling it, and if the 17 other people in the room do the same thing, then it’s just going to get worse and worse.
I happen to be gay, and you come out constantly. You don’t just come out when you’re 19. I’ll probably be in a cab a week from now, and the cab driver will say, oh, you got triplets. What’s your wife think about that?
So I’ll have to come out about being gay, and I may not want to. And I may be tired, and I don’t feel like trying to have a transformative moment what the cab driver. But you gotta speak your truth, otherwise you’ll never be happy. I think happiness– I don’t think it comes from the accumulation of money. It comes from your moment to moment existence, and how authentic you are to yourself, to who you really are. You can look yourself in the mirror and say, I’m the same person. I’m not one person in front of this person and another person in front of that person.
SARAH GREEN: Well, Dan, thanks again so much for taking some time to talk with us today about this.
DAN PALLOTTA: All right, thank you.
SARAH GREEN: That’s Dan Pallotta, president of Advertising for Humanity. To join the jargon-free conversation, visit hbr.org.