What drives you bonkers?

At the Melcrum conference the week before last Wendy May of Zurich insurance let slip that she hates the terms "journey" and "solution" when used in a business context. 

Having just written a proposal jam packed full of references to journeys and lots of travel analogies I can't really agree with her on that one.  But Solution????

'Solution' is one of those words that people stick into sentences to make them sound important.  You actually have a choice of such words - for example we've all spotted 'Strategic', 'synergy' and 'socialised'.  And that's just starting with 'S' but the point is to pop them in purely to make the sentece seem weighty.

And then there's the stock opener.

Recent premutations include "...In a fast moving global economy [insert any unsubstantiated assertion at this point]" and "Our new customer focused strategy means [insert any irrelevant annuncement].  Someone admitted to me last week on a Black Belt Course that she recently found herself using the cardinal sin of internal communications cliches ...." People are our greatest asset...".

This isn't a moan about grammar - just boring writing...A while ago when Sue and I launched the competency model someone gently suggested to us that we could have been more ambitious or aspirational on behalf of the profession....

Liam

Comments

[Sue]

Trouble is, you (I!) tend to go into auto-pilot when you're surrounded by this kind of language day in, day out.

I just noticed that I'd written '.... positive or negative' and mentally slapped myself and changed it to 'good or bad'.

Certain types of writing are so ingrained in some corporate cultures that you can have a fairly soul-destroying time seeing everything you write in 'real language' getting changed back into corporate speak. Been there, torn my hair out, had to sense check with proper, non-HQ people whether I really am writing in in Mickey Mouse speak, and if writing about 'leveraging operational strategies to build market-leading propositions' is actually normal ...

Oh, and 'As you know ...' is one of my pet hates. It usually translates into 'We alluded to this in a note we wrote 6 months ago - remember?? So if this comes as a shock or it's totally out of context, don't blame us guv.' And even if it doesn't translate as that, it's predictable and boring and should be banned herewith. So there.