The Naked MBA

“I don’t really have the bandwidth to concentrate on this right now so I think we should circle back next week—don’t focus an anything that’s not mission-critical; instead let’s leverage historical knowledge and aim for the low-hanging fruit. I’ll ping you later to touch base and scope the project at 30,000 feet.”

Ever catch yourself talking like this? If you say yes, you’ve probably gone to business school. Business school scores the worst on the jargon scale. (Medical school and law school have an advantage because Latin phrases actually mean something.)

Columbia Business School goes so far as to offer an English Language Skills and Cultural Interaction Boot Camp to incoming students. Students analyze jargon they’re likely to hear and practice how to respond. The hope is that the phrases they learn will be useful as they interview on campus for summer internships and later, when they enter the workforce. It’s geared towards international students but I could have used a similar course before entering business school straight from my French major and my job at a non-profit.

I had one kind friend who offered to tutor me on business-speak. We met up one afternoon to practice. “Ok,” she said, “walk me through the responsibilities you had in your last position.” I told her I made sure we weren’t going bankrupt by calling our accountant a lot to see if clients had paid us. She told me I “managed short-term liquidity needs”. Huh? I told her I kept track of which employees were selling lots of our programs and tried to figure out why others weren’t. She told me I was “tracking sales on a monthly basis to design incentive programs and maximize revenue”. She was really good at jargon. I, on the other hand, still felt like I trying to speak a foreign language. Then I realized that I was good at learning foreign languages. French came easily to me. Spanish wasn’t so hard. Business jargon couldn’t be such a stretch.

I practiced a little everyday--I read Business Week, the McKinsey Quarterly and kept my ears open among my classmates. You start to pick it up quickly, and then suddenly you can only talk in beautifully cryptic sentences that have no real meaning. Take the phrase “results-based management”. Isn’t all management supposed to be based on results? Jargon keeps us from being specific and from truly communicating important ideas.

So why do we use jargon? Why can’t we just straight-talk, call it like it is, and clearly communicate an idea in language that the average person understands? Because jargon is like a secret handshake—it means you’re part of the club. People only want you in their club if you sound like them, not like the average person. The trouble is, jargon leads to a lot of talk that doesn’t mean anything.

You can change this. Just say no to jargon. When someone says something like “The goal is to deliver granular connectivity on a scalable platform”, ask them what exactly they mean. Ask them for an example. Make them back up their jargon and they may think twice about using it again.