Somebody called to seek publicity for a consulting business and started blathering about empowerment and synergies, paradigms and leveraging.
Somebody else wrote a press release about a business startup. It ran on about organizational effectiveness, experiential diversity and initiating tactical strategies. Oh, yes, it also intended to be a change catalyst.
In neither case was it clear what the business actually did. Stringing together a bunch of buzzwords is pretentious and a poor way to communicate.
Far from branding the sender as a member of a professional elite who knows the jargon, such words scream: “Warning! Incapable of translating concepts into language that everyone can understand!”
Good presentation skills are important for advertisers, marketers, public relations practitioners and anyone who has to give a report or pitch an idea.
The most important goal is to be understood–and fuzzy buzzwords won’t help.
If your job requires you to transmit business concepts, it’s a good idea to take inventory of words or phrases that might be confusing your message.
In addition to the above-mentioned clunkers, erase these puffed-up victims of overuse:
Proactive, interface, value-added, benchmarking, core competencies, functionality, facilitate, scalable, utilize, incentivize, partnering, virtual, dialogue (as a verb) and knowledge or change management.
Get rid, too, of the mindless redundancies: advance planning, new innovation, most unique, end result, final outcome, general consensus (and especially the double redundancy–general consensus of opinion).
We recently got a press release about somebody’s new job: creating an end-to-end customer lifecycle process.
Can you imagine actually telling someone that’s what you do for a living?
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