‘The Corporate’s Speech’

Why is it that the majority of business people have a problem with getting people to understand what they are saying? Colin Firth’s brilliant portrayal of the stammering King George VI shows how difficult it can be to just to speak. Whilst King George had a serious speech impediment the same is not true of big corporate businesses, and yet the strangulated nonsense that comes out of these organisations is often more incomprehensible than the agonised speech of the stammerer.

I spend a lot of time working on ‘messaging’ with my clients. This is where the organisation has to tell me what they do and what business they are in in 10 simple words. Business to business organisations find this exercise almost impossible. If I got £100 for every time I have heard ‘we provide tailored solutions’ I would be a very rich woman by now!

Somewhere along the line the business world has come to believe that they must describe what they do in the longest most complicated way. They feel safe behind their wall of words which usually says very little about what they do or who they are.

This month NEST, the new ‘pensions for everybody’ organisation launched a guide for the public to understand ‘pensionese’. So out goes ‘You should notify us who your nominated beneficiary is in case you die before retirement’ and in comes ‘Tell us who you want to get your pension money if you die before hitting retirement’. Think about it! We now have to have the equivalent of interpreters to understand what business is saying to us.

Language psychologists Bernstein and Labov who undertook extensive research in how speech was used in the middle and working classes found that the more middle class we were the more convoluted we get.

“It is painfully obvious that in many ways working-class speakers are more effective narrators, reasoners, and debaters than many middle- class speakers who temporize, qualify and lose their argument in a mass of irrelevant detail”

This is quite a worrying phenomenon which suggests that the more educated we are the more difficult we will find it to have simple and persuasive conversations. With the average attention span being 7-10 seconds most people will have lost the plot before the speaker has finished the sentence.

You would think that with the advent of twitter, linked in and other social media that short pithy sentences would come easier. NOT SO! In fact verbal constipation seems to be getting worse. I recently struggled with trying to get a client to move away from their inscribed-in-stone corporate mantra of ‘World class, on-site, tailored entertainment’ to the ‘hottest ticket in town’. If it were you, which would you want to go to?

My golden rule when talking about what you do is: imagine that you are speaking to an intelligent 14 year old. If you have one at home try it out on them. If they don’t understand it is unlikely that anyone else will.