Financial Times journalist Lucy Kellaway's "Point of View" this morning on BBC Radio 4 was a terrific diatribe against several aspects of business language. Not least the growing use of terms like "reaching out", "going forward", "warm(est) regards", "passion", and "heads up" (gulp.... that's one I've used...).
For a while you can listen to the piece as a 10 minute broadcast. Otherwise you'll need to read it. (And you will enjoy this word-cloud based on it.) Excerpt:
"Yet what no list of words can get at is the new business insincerity: a phoney upping of the emotional ante. Last week I got an e-mail from someone I had never met that began by saying "I'm reaching out to you" and ended "warmest personal regards". As her regards had no business to be either warm or personal, the overall effect was somewhat chilling.
But this incontinent gush is nothing compared to an e-mail sent by an extremely powerful person at JP Morgan encouraging his investment banking team to be more human. In it he said: "Take the time today to call a client and tell them you love them. They won't forget you made the call." Indeed. I'm sure the client would remember such a call for a very long time.
If love has no place in the language of business, neither does passion. Passion, says the dictionary, means a strong sexual desire or the suffering of Christ at the crucifixion. In other words it doesn't really have an awful lot to do with a typical day in the office - unless things have gone very wrong indeed. And yet passion is something that every employee must attest to in order to get through any selection process. Every one of the candidates in the final rounds of interview on the Apprentice solemnly declared that they were passionate about being Sir Alan's Apprentice."
I recently woke up laughing from a dream in which I was in an airport where the staff had been instructed to tell passengers aggrieved for whatever reason - lost baggage, delayed and cancelled flights - 'my heart goes out to you'.
Posted by: Margaret Wilmot | 16/06/2008 at 09:11