To Clean Up Markets, Abolish Cliches(Matthew Lynn is a columnist for Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are his own.)
By Matthew Lynn
London, Feb. 4 (Bloomberg) -- Nobody expects business people to have much talent for writing or speaking: they are paid to decide and execute. Even so, the degradation of the English language as used in business is getting dangerous. It has become hard for people to talk clearly about matters upon which the livelihoods of millions depend. And because they can't talk clearly, they don't think clearly either.
The universal acceptance of stock phrases has rotted people's ability to identify rubbish when it is being spoken. The results can be expensive -- as shareholders in Enron Corp., United Pan- Europe Communications NV, or NTL Inc., as well as countless dot coms have just discovered to their cost.
Most of us are already tediously familiar with the phrases: business model, networks, scalability, leveraging platforms, weightlessness, and anything containing the word virtual. They are used so frequently in most discussions of business they have become a kind of verbal Muzak -- heard, but not listened to.
Here, for example, is former Enron chief executive Ken Lay talking about the late Cliff Baxter, in October 2000: ``Cliff is a key member of the team that has built Enron's highly successful wholesale business. His promotion will facilitate an even greater focus on extending that business model.''
Trending Up
Or here is Barclay Knapp, chief executive of NTL Inc., who is currently re-negotiating the $17.5 billion his company owes to its bankers and bondholders: ``We are currently negotiating with more than one mobile operator to do a VNO (virtual network operator) agreement.''
The cliche of the moment, particularly among technology companies, is ``visibility.'' As in, ``Visibility is improving and our customer's long-range forecasts are beginning to trend up,'' according to Amkor Technology Inc., a semi-conductor assembly company last week.
The greatest essay ever written on the destructive power of cliches is George Orwell's ``Politics and the English Language,'' published in 1946. Orwell was complaining mainly about the way Communism and Fascism had corrupted the language, but his arguments echo through the intervening decades.
Orwell made two main points about the use of vague language, dead metaphors and absurd jargon. One, abandoning a proper use of the language makes it easier to think and do stupid things. Two, by assembling a string of cliches, a speaker does more than deceive his audience. He deceives himself.
Foolish Thoughts
Here is Orwell on the first point: ``A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English Language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.''
And here he is on the second point: ``A speaker who uses that kind of phraseology has gone some distance towards turning himself into a machine. The appropriate noises are coming out of his larynx, but his brain is not involved as it would be if he were choosing his words for himself.''
Quite so. Cliches numb the ears of both the speaker and the audience. Like lullabies, they are designed more for putting you to sleep than conveying any specific information.
It's obvious how dangerous commercial cliches are when you think what some of them actually mean. Cliches are used to stop people from noticing that some very bad things are happening to their money. Consider these four examples.
Four Examples
Business model: It can be taken as a given that anyone who uses the phrase ``business model'' probably doesn't have a model, and soon won't have a business either. What they are actually trying to say is that their company doesn't make any money, and they don't know how it ever will.
Scalability: Anyone who uses the phrase ``scalability'' is only thinking about the scale of their bonus, or possibly their jail sentence. What they are trying to say is that their company will only ever make money if it gets much, much bigger, but that since it won't, it will probably always lose money.
Virtual: Users of ``virtual'' actually mean to say ``almost, but not really.'' Thus a ``virtual network operator'' is not really a network operator, but just kidding around at it, and spending lots of other people's money in the process.
Visibility: When someone uses the word ``visibility'' he usually doesn't have any idea what is going to happen to his company beyond Tuesday of next week. That does not bode well. The driver of a car only lacks ``visibility'' when he is about to go over a cliff, and the same is true of the driver of a company.
Worse Than Euphemism
In each case, people are saying something that should make investors worried: we don't know how to make profits, we don't know what size the company should be, we can't do what we said we'd do, we don't know if we'll ever get any more orders. But the use of the cliche, and its acceptance by their audience, lulls them into a sense that this is a normal situation. That is wrong.
Corporations have always had a weaknesses for euphemism -- hence the popularity of words such as downsizing or de-hiring for firing people. That is because most business people are nice, polite people who are occasionally called upon to do nasty things, and would rather not refer to it openly. It may be bourgeois and sometimes amusing, but no great harm is done.
Today's cliches go beyond euphemism. They are about destroying clear and rational thought. There are lots of reasons for the corporate scandals and collapses that are taking place around the world. The perversion of corporate language may only have played a small role -- but a role all the same.
Blow a Raspberry
In his 1946 essay, Orwell recommends jeering at everyone who uses cliches as the first step to cleansing the language of nonsense. And he was right. Words such as ``downsizing'' have just about been laughed out of the lexicon. If anyone wants to help restore the world economy to health, here is a modest proposal. Every time anyone uses a word like virtual, visibility, or worst of all, business model, start giggling and blowing raspberries, or throwing paper darts. Soon they will have to start saying and even thinking about what they actually mean.