Most of the time, business communications are either horribly unclear or terribly boring. Disagree? I present three examples.
1. From a research paper from one of the country’s top business schools:
As [business scholars] adopt a longitudinal dimension to their research, they will more readily be able to document the intersection of continuities and contingencies, and the effects of context on outcomes.
2. From a trade publication on consumer goods, describing one of the industry’s leaders:
He was one of the first to understand…an amplified need to respond to shortened innovation cycles as well as supply chain agility to provide growth in competitive market conditions.
3. From a company’s description in its press release:
[The company] is a leading provider of real-time data integration software that enables access, sharing and distribution of data across heterogeneous enterprise platforms, organizations, and the cloud.
If you’re like me, you read phrases like “heterogeneous enterprise platforms” and just sigh. In my work as a financial writer, I come across this sort of corporate-speak all the time—whether in research papers, industry publications, meetings, speeches, or PowerPoint presentations. I’m often guilty of it myself—just regurgitating bland, essentially meaningless phrases to sound “sophisticated” or blend in. Whether it’s me or someone else sounding this way, if I think about it long enough I’m forced to ask one question.
Why?
Why do we do it? What’s our reason? Why is corporate language so often abstract, pretentious, or bland?
As I’ll attempt to show in the following posts, I think the real answer’s deeper than we think.
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In the summer of 1990, after Greg Maddux had gone almost three months without winning a baseball game, he picked up the phone. Four years into the big leagues, the right-handed pitcher for the Chicago Cubs found himself in a miserable slump. His pitches were getting crushed like Christmas walnuts. Between May and July, he’d lost eight games and his ERA had more than doubled.
He’d struggled before, but this time something was different. In the past, fixing an errant fastball was primarily a matter of working with a pitching coach to fine-tune his mechanics: the grip on the ball, the angle of his elbow. But now, after having tweaked his technique without results, he realized the problem was not so much in his mechanics; it was in his head. And so he turned to a 55-year-old former English teacher from the Bronx named Harvey Dorfman, a man who had become known as one of baseball’s greatest psychologists, to pinpoint the deeper reason, the real culprit, behind his sloppy pitches.
It worked.
After meeting with Dorfman, somehow Maddux started pitching better. A lot better. The rest of the season, he went 12-6. Within two years of their initial meeting, Maddux won the National League Cy Young. From 1990 to 2008, Maddux went on to star for the Cubs, Braves, Dodgers, and Padres and amassed 295 wins, entering the Hall of Fame in 2014. So what did Dorfman do? How did he help Maddux turn it around? Maddux explained in a 1997 interview with Fox.
“He taught me how to like myself.”
Come again?
“He gave me more confidence about how to live. Not necessarily how to pitch, just how to live my life the way I want to live it. It helped my marriage, helped my golf game, helped me out on the mound.”
In other words, whether we acknowledge it or not, there’s a very real connection between the precision with which a curveball is thrown and whether the pitcher throwing it is happy inside. No, sloppy mechanics weren’t the source of Maddux’s problem. They were a symptom.
The same can be said of business communications.
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For almost anything, there are reasons, and then there are deeper reasons. Why did one of the country’s biggest banks lose billions in the second quarter of 2012? Because the value of its corporate credit default swaps fell considerably. Okay, but why did it really lose billions? Because it took on too much risk.
Often we focus on the more superficial explanations—on mechanics—instead of finding the root causes. Maddux is throwing the ball poorly because his release is too high. Acme Barbeques had a bad quarter because of dwindling consumer demand. Laura didn’t make the sale because she was late for the prospect meeting. But the real reasons are that Greg’s afraid of failure, the company’s barbecues are ugly and hard to clean, and Laura doesn’t believe in the product.
So that brings us to the question: Why do we communicate as poorly as we do in business?
The surface-level answer is that our mechanics are wrong. In the 2007 bestseller Made to Stick, Dan and Chip Heath argue that the key to making a marketing slogan or corporate speech clear and memorable is following six key techniques: Strip down an idea to its core. Surprise the reader. Offer detail. Use examples that people can imagine. Appeal to emotion. Tell stories.
Or take the plain language movement, a group of professionals seeking to eliminate jargon and confusing language in government documents. Thanks in part to their efforts, in 2010 President Obama signed a federal bill that requires government agencies to simplify documents explaining federal benefits or services. Part of simplifying those pieces is heeding several writing principles the organization promotes: using the active voice, writing “must” instead of “shall,” and so forth.
Here’s the thing: These critics are absolutely right. Businesses do communicate boringly because they’re not, for instance, keeping the message simple (I recently read an article that talked about the importance of having “tacit knowledge structures” in business. Ouch.)
But…
That’s not the real problem. The real, deeper problem is that we don’t really want to communicate clearly. And that’s because of three deeper things. The first is fear, the second is intellectual laziness, and the third is pride.
What does that mean? It means that, because of these three obstacles, even if everyone in the world read about the importance of writing in plain English, we’d probably still hear that a company “faced supply chain disruption” instead of hearing that one of their tomato trucks crashed on the highway.
The problem is not so much that businesses need to change their communication mechanics—although they certainly do—but rather, workers like you and me need to change our dispositions to become more receptive to the right way of communicating. In other words, just as Greg Maddux had to find a way to like himself before making his fastball more accurate, so too do businessmen and women need to address three subtle underlying issues before communicating well.
The next column will take a deeper look into this first hindrance: fear.
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Ricky McRoskey 
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