Like these Dish readers, Jim Manzi defends elements of business jargon:
Jargon develops inside organizations, in part, to help coordinate activities efficiently. It should lead the author of the criticisms to question her premises when at least some of these terms are widely used not only in unsuccessful, but also highly successful, corporations.
Another reader chimes in:
While I too applaud the goal of the website Unsuck It, I think it misses the central problem of corporate language used in consulting, finance and the law. The issue is not that people use jargon to describe specific things that might be better stated another way; the problem is how often people use corporate catch phrases to say nothing at all.
The consulting word I hate most is "deliverable." Unsuck It defines the word as "a piece of a project," but it is broadly used in my business to mean anything that anyone might produce and deliver to a client or even another consultant. Sure, a piece of a project is a deliverable, but so is the entire completed project. An early draft of a project is not an acceptable deliverable for a client, but it might well be a deliverable for the project manager. Deliverable might refer to the content of a presentation, or to its physical manifestation. An email is a deliverable. So is a speech. A Power Point presentation is obviously a deliverable, and a single slide or graphic within the presentation is a deliverable, and I have (sadly) seen many a Power Point slide expound broadly on the topic of deliverables. Whenever a colleague uses "deliverable" in my presence, I am seized with a strong desire to bring the meeting to a shrieking halt and demand an actual, specific description of the thing he expects to be delivered.
Imagine if we used these sorts of meaningless, reflexive nouns to describe all the objects in our lives. This apple in my lunch? It's actually just an eatable, just like everything else I consume today. I'm writing this sendable to you on a typeable. When I'm done, I'll lean back in my sitable and use my thinkable to imagine a world that doesn't turn me into a suicideable.
Consultants use words like deliverable because it saves them the trouble of actually explaining what they do, because the meat of our work is so often complicated, imprecise, and poorly conceived. This problem, though, is precisely why consultants (and lawyers and other people who traffic in ideas instead of concrete physical products) should avoid vague, meaningless words. If your goal on a project is complicated and imprecise, your first step should be to think hard about those goals, identify and name them. When you rely on "action items" and "deliverables" to get you to the end, you will most likely produce something nearly as meaningless and useless as the words you've used to describe its creation.
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