Alastair Crow

Court Mage

Lanhydnock

Bodmin

United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland

George Washington

8 Albany Place

Albany

Washington

5th July 1755

Re: Proper measures for the management of local populations

Dear Mr. Washington

I am writing to you to confirm your interest in enacting a programme of population management in the area of Albany and, hopefully, across the Americas. I have been led to understand that some residents of the Americas who might be considered allies of yours have been occasionally remiss in their support for proper population measures, and are not completely on board with the goals of the Iron House in this regard. I would like to assure myself that these concerns are not felt by your or your own senior commanders, and that you are not allowing “out-of-mission” concerns to cloud your thinking in respect of key mission objectives.

As you know, my own senior management team have given me certain Key Performance Indicators to which I must conform in my dealings in the Americas; and that these KPIs are not just more readily facilitated by expeditious management of Native Population Issues, but actually require that I neutralise unnecessary sentient obstacles to achieve certain demographic goals. In previous letters you have indicated that you share these demographic goals, but I would like to gain your assurance that you will act with all due haste to meet the Population Management Objectives we have previously discussed.

In addition to enabling me to meet the terms of some of my KPIs, effective elimination of locally-based opposition will significantly hasten achievement of core strategic objectives for both parties. I hope we can achieve synergy in this matter, though as ever my Senior Management Team have indicated a willingness to step in where your own resources prove inadequate. I believe we both wish to minimise disruption to Senior Management Team schedules, as a failure to leave strategic resources of this sort untapped will be considered in my annual performance review and will undoubtedly affect your benefits at An Indeterminate Future Point. To this end I would like your assurance that you are devoting maximal resources to progress mutually agreed project outcomes.

Regards

Alastair Crow

I’m in the middle of writing a book about the epic fails of capitalism (a project that’s got much bigger in the last 12 months), and in the part of the book that deals with mergers – a rich source of epic failure – there’s one that stands head and shoulders above the rest: AOL and Time Warner.

When we were doing the research into the press coverage of the merger, one thing stands out: the number of reporters who faithfully wrote down that the two businesses would capitalise on their synergies, without really asking what those synergies might actually, you know, be.

Synergy is a weasel word for making people redundant and selling the buildings that they worked in, and also a vague placeholder for we want some of their stuff to make our stuff work better. In the first case, using it avoids awkward words like redundancy that make people glum, and in the second, it avoids actually telling us what they are going to do.

It’s now pretty clear that AOL-Time Warner needed a lot of the first type of synergy, because there was bugger all of the second type.

I went back to the Factiva database to see whether there are more businesses claiming synergy these days, and there are, big time. I searched in the European and North American business press, and compared the number of articles mentioning mergers with the number mentioning mergers and synergies too. M&A volumes may be at their lowest for five years but the synergy bubble never bursts. Mentions of synergy are 402 per cent up in the last 30 years, and the rise has been wonderfully consistent:

In just over 30 years it has become five times as likely that a business will describe a merger as providing synergies (or, at least, that this lazy rebranding will be reported in the press).

It might just be that synergy has just become a vogue word. But I think it’s also due to positive word bias, which is far more of a problem.

To explain: every M&A deal has some rationale beyond a pooling of capital and saving on letterheads. The benefits can be difficult to explain, easy to question, or impossible to measure accurately. Three reasons not to go into too much detail if you want to push it through quickly – especially if you’re directly or indirectly incentivised to make the merger work. If you want to create momentum in the media or among shareholders and employees (and in your own mind) it helps to give the benefits a positive-sounding, catchy, go-for-it name.

That name is synergy: code for the things we don’t really want to talk about right now. It won’t make your merger work any better, but it might make more people believe that it will. And if your reward comes more from the deal than the messy aftermath, it pays to talk about synergy.

"But what does 'Magna Carta' actually mean?"

I don’t care what you think: I like several lawyers. They can be witty, interesting people. They hold conferences in nice hotels and sometimes ask me to speak. Usually they’re polite afterwards. And get lawyers talking about something that isn’t the law, and often they are funny and clever.

Also, for a jobbing freelance, law firms pay well and usually have excellent biscuits when you visit them. I went for a meeting in one firm’s office and chef in a tall hat came to ask me what I wanted for lunch. Another firm has by far the best pencils I have ever used in its meeting rooms (at least it did until they left me alone for five minutes).

But if you’re editing copy for them, they don’t half make you earn the money. Lawyers write like badly-programmed jargonbots. Here’s a paragraph that I was asked to fix up a while ago for a business magazine:

Section 217 of the Companies Act 2006 provides that (except in the case of a bona fide termination payment) it is unlawful for a company to make payment to any of its directors by way of compensation for loss of office, or as consideration for or in connection with their retirement from office, without particulars of the proposed payment (including its amount) being disclosed to, and approved by ordinary resolution of, the members of the company.

No, I don’t either.

I’ve learned that it is basically pointless offering advice to lawyers on how to write like a journalist. Maybe that is because they’re earning ten times as much as me, so it’s understandable if they don’t really see an urgent need to adapt to my way of thinking. It’s more useful for me to pass on a few tips on how the rest of us can write like a lawyer:

1. If you don’t want to be easily understood, Latin is always better than English. When writing for a general reader I can tell you a priori that inter alia it’s your erga omnes right to stick in a few phrases in a language that they don’t understand, just so they know who’s the daddy. After all, nulla poena sine lege. I have no idea what I’ve just typed.

2. Qualify every statement no matter how meaningless. A rule of thumb: never use less than four clauses in each sentence, and don’t use full stops when there are perfectly good commas going to waste. If you used short sentences then people would be able to read your article out loud to peasants; and then poor illiterate people would understand your argument and your status will be forever compromised.

3. Ultimately, sit on the fence. Real advice has to be paid for, so make anything written for non-payers look like you’re going to help them right up to the last sentence – then don’t. Useful final-paragraph phrases for appearing to be helpful while being no bloody use at all include telling us that we should keep a watching brief rather than actually do anything, or that we might also give careful consideration to something you haven’t previously mentioned, or that we could usefully keep abreast of whatever it is that you’re supposed to have made us abreast of in the preceding six paragraphs. Not many people will complain, because few of them will have made it this far anyway.

4. Use the passive voice where at all possible. It will be seen that this may possess utility. Paragraphs should be drawn up by the lawyers concerned only after careful consideration of this advice. Articles composed in this fashion will be credited with education and poshness – by other lawyers, anyway. Other people ask why you are writing in this weird way. Ignore them! Or should I say: endeavour to ensure that they are ignored.

5. Favour obsolete words. Keep a stock of aforementioneds, hereinafters, forthwiths and herebys, and use them to give your prose the authentic feel of the 18th century.

6. Most important: never take advice on this subject from people who are not lawyers.

For a feature I’ve just written for Research Magazine I’ve just been chatting to David Spiegelhalter, Professor of the Public Understanding of Risk at the University of Cambridge about how we present statistics. He admits he shouts at the TV when they use statistics that scare or confuse you without helping you.

There are plenty of stats that use percentages or relative likelihoods to compare stuff (before versus after, or this versus that), without really giving us a clue. An example: if you drive 10 miles to by a lottery ticket, you are between 3 and 20 times more likely to die in a car wreck than win the lottery.

The answer to this is not, as my mum pointed out, that you can buy lottery tickets online these days. Comparing the risk of driving (from which, every time you don’t die, you usually get a benefit) and the reward for buying a lottery ticket is like comparing a gun with a gnu because they use the same letters.

The professor would rather we stuck to presenting statistics, where possible, as what would happen to a set of people (10, 100, or for rare events, 1000): for example, according to the Office for National Statistics, for every 1000 people who died in 2008 around 330 died from circulatory (heart) disease – and only five in transport accidents. This might imply that overweight gamblers might be better off walking to buy a lottery ticket than driving. Unless you really, really like living dangerously.

I don’t understand why magazines and newspapers – and marketing departments and think tanks – don’t have a house style on how statistics are presented – for example, insiting that spokespeople qualify “up by 20 per cent” statements with what the expected outcome would be in terms of death, or Euros, or gnus (plus a confidence limit). Newspaper style books have pages about the correct title for a judge and whether you can use aggravate as a synonym for irritate, but I’ve never seen one with instructions on comparative statistics. Maybe it’s because the people who compile style guides know a lot about the meaning of words, but less about the meaning of numbers.

It’s not as if the “for every X people” stat isn’t visual enough. For example, I can give you the interesting (and true) statistic that for every 10 people who come to Talk Normal from a search engine, two have searched for either naked or naked people:

Try this article from Joanna Blythman in The Herald called Scientists must not dictate on public health matters (better leave that job, it seems, to Joanna Blythman). While complaining about Professor David Nutt, she tells us that scientists think their knowledge

is superior to other types of knowledge we might bring to bear on our decisions, such as intuition, experience, observation, or even common sense.

Even when they have used all four, plus scientific method too. She’s a skilled polemicist:

The huffing and puffing of Nutt and his indignant allies has obscured the fact that whatever the rest of society thinks or knows about cannabis…

Note: thinks or knows. As in, if Joanna Blythman thinks something, and has used intuition etc, then she knows it, so it must be better than anything a scientist has boiled up in a laboratory. Especially if she agrees with you.

It doesn’t stop her throwing around a few stats at the end to make her point that the only scientists who know about statistics are the ones who produce statistics she likes. For example:

Now we learn, once again from bona fide scientific research, that pregnant women taking folic acid supplements are up to 30% more likely to produce babies with asthma. Yet still the folic acid lobby is arguing that we should press on regardless with blanket fortification of bread and continue to advocate supplements during pregnancy…

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how to use statistics to confuse people. Quite apart from the fact that she neglects to point out that the research isn’t from a random sample and shows a weak correlation, that a lack of folic acid causes spina bifida and other problems, we don’t have a chart that shows the effect of this up to 30% as an outcome for 1000 babies born today. We can’t draw one, because so far this research doesn’t tell us enough with enough certainty. On the other hand, we know a lot about the damage caused to babies by poor nutrition during pregnancy.

One of the problems with the presentation of statistics in the press is that you can always slice the results to be more dramatic then they really are, and that suits a speak-your-branes columnist like Blythman. Even journalists who don’t know much about numbers know how to do this. And so I can’t help thinking that in-house standards for newspapers on how they present statistics about are far more important than pages of rules on how to refer to the wife of a marquess or an earl*.

* marchioness and countess, respectively. Pointless as it is, the second one’s good for pub quizzes.

Somewhere along the line I read a snippet of advice for web authors. It was something along the lines of, “copy a typical paragraph from your most popular recent article, paste it, quoted, into the Google search box, and see what comes up.

Well, I didn’t uncover any signs of plagiarism, but in a search without quotes the only “similar” documents were PubMed and Elsevier posts. I am failing to make things simpler.

Another little game is to feed the same paragraph into a style checker. Truly sad. I may well be the web’s number one suspect in the crime of “weasel words”.

I am, however, going to present a defense on both counts.

The basis of my defense is the concept of “precision in language”.

For those who have not stumbled upon references to my strong OCPD (obsessive compulsive personality disorder) traits, I refer to them now. In the process from my recovery from alcoholism/depression/bipolar/depression I became aware of events in my past that led me to cultivate a not-wholly satisfactory survival strategy. Having determined that conventional means of dealing with OCPD have a rather poor track record, I devised a plan of my own.

The plan was simple, and I should mention here, alpha/theta sessions are the BEST for self-administered cognitive therapy!

Identify every trait that caused grief for myself or anyone I cared about. Review the experiences and the sources of information from which they evolved. Modify memories as required and the day-to-day behaviour follows.

Identify every trait that is recognisable as outside the bell curve of normality. Decide whether it pleases or displeases me. Practice Buddhist-derived mindfulness techniques.

Among the things in which I have a choice is an extreme sense of truth and justice.

Over the years I have developed the idiosyncratic style of speaking and writing that you’re becoming familiar with. Yes, I do speak very much as I write. As every year has passed my statements have become seemingly more vague. Along the way I’ve loosened up a lot too – when I know I’m being a prat, I will often use perverse twists of grammar that would have an English teacher in tears, that’s how wicked I am.

I’ve been a voracious experiencer. I haven’t done many things to the point of being good at them, but I have done a spectacular number of things to the point of knowing whether I wanted to commit more time to them. The vast majority of my more interesting experiences have been created on the basis of “that doesn’t look so hard”, and then going out and begging, borrowing or buying the resources. With my enthusiasm for self-guided study, the internet has been my friend, but it hasn’t proven to be very trustworthy. I encounter very few sites that are as accurate as they lead one to believe. I’m not saying they are wholly wrong, but they present absolute statements that are true only under specific, but unspecified conditions.

I read a whole lot of stuff, from fluff to way out of my depth. As I read I register key statements and weight their importance with their context. Who says a thing matters a lot. What else was said matters a lot. Who it was being said to matters a lot. This mulches around to become “a feeling” for a subject, and when I speak or write about that subject, the number of qualifiers or weasel words that I use is inversely proportional to my confidence in the absolute veracity and practical significance of the information I’m conveying.

Another OCPD characteristic I have by the bucket-load is an oft inconvenient sense of ethics and morality. There’s a whole lot of stuff rattling around between my ears that isn’t for general distribution. I will only “share” as much as I feel is my property to share – other people’s stories and insights are theirs, and I will retell them only in a generalised form and only in the context of illustrating my own thoughts or acknowledging that there has been precedent thought.

Taking all these points together, I have learned that almost everything that can be simply said is a lie in some context. By counting my evasions you will get a strong sense of how closely I believe the information I am conveying approximates a fact.

I have learned that experts in a field use specialised terminology because they are working at levels of detail where distinctions invisible to the casual observer become extremely important. Any word other than the correct term is going to contain less meaning, and hence be less correct, potentially ambiguous. Why did I use the phrase “specialised terminology” when I could have used “jargon”? Because “jargon”, although a fully correct synonym for the phrase, has become loaded with anti-intellectualism, a meaning I do not wish to convey.

A casualty of my obsessive precision in language has been my conception of trust. Never trust me unless you have defined the confidence you are placing in me and I have agreed to the terms. My senses of truth, justice, ethics and morality will probably see you treated more fairly than is the societal norm, but if you perceive something I do as being a breach of your trust, you’d better check back on our most recent agreement on the relevant values. Love, as appallingly poorly defined concept, is treated with similar caution. This amounts, in most cases, to a matter of not making assumptions.

So, my jury of peers, I beg that you forgive me my tendency to verbosity, and predilection for polysyllabic words. It is not an affectation, nor any attempt to convey authority beyond that to which I am entitled. It is a true reflection of my internal processes, processes that I have considered carefully and find desirable in myself.

Cheers,
Craig

Dear Inquirer,

In Julia Zappei’s 11/06/2009 article “Malaysia Rejects Call to Release 10,000 Bibles,” she writes:

Christians say the Muslim Malay-dominated government is violating their right to practice their religion freely.

As a reader, I would like to know, who are these Christians. Do you mean “All Christians” or probably just 10-20 or 30 Christians, or just some Christian Denominations (if so, which Denominations).

Did you even interview one or two Christians from Malaysia who think that the Malaysian government is indeed violating their right to practice their religion freely? Or even any other Christian from outside of Malaysia? If so, who are these Christians?

Please dont hesitate to answer my questions. At your earliest convenience, that is.  :P

Sincerely Yours,
Ako Pa Rin

Dear INQUIRER,

Philippine Daily Inquirer, please remind TJ Burgonio and Donna Pazzibugan (and possibly, Amy Remo) to raise important questions to clarify unclear statements of a source. In their 11/06/2009 article Palace Rejects Talk with Oil Companies, they write:

Malacañang on Thursday rejected the appeal of oil companies for a dialogue with President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo on the possible recall of an executive order freezing fuel prices in Luzon, which remains in a state of calamity. But Justice Secretary Agnes Devanadera indicated that the order may soon be lifted in specific areas as the government and oil firms try to reach an agreement on a mutually acceptable response to the devastation wrought by successive storms.

The Justice Secretary “indicated” that an order will be “soon” lifted in specific “areas.” I am interested to know how did she indicate the upcoming order. I also would like to know how “soon” is “soon”, will that be within the month, within the last quarter, or within this year, or by the end of the year? When is “soon” and how “soon” is “soon”. Also, When Ms. Devanadera said that the “order will be lifted in specific areas…”, she was not really specific, because she failed to specify which areas those are, did she?

I am really interested to know,
Ako Pa Rin!

Dear ABS-CBN and Gigi Grande,

Please change the title of this article: Labor attaché may be recalled due to ‘unpaid obligations’, ‘deceit’.

In the report Grande said:

AUSTRALIA – The Philippine Embassy in Australia has recommended the immediate removal of Labor Attaché Victor Julio Ablan from office. Foreign Affairs Undersecretary Franklin Ebdalin said the recommendation was made in early October due to Ablan’s alleged “unpaid obligations” and “deceit”.

Would it be better to remove the weasel words “may be” from the title and change it to “Immediate Removal of Labor Attache Recommended” or something to that effect, without the “may be” …

I could be wrong.

Again,
Its Me.

Dear ABS-CBN,

In “Pro-Noy Celebrities Defended” , Reyma Buan-Deveza writes:

Osorio also downplayed speculations that ABS-CBN was favoring Noynoy. The speculations cited the network’s purported too much coverage of his activities. Some also said that the senator allegedly gets too many airtime on ABS-CBN because his sister is a contract star of the network.

I remember my teacher telling me to be careful about Weasel Words. Maybe you should remind Reyma to avoid using weasels.

Weasel Word Alert: Who are these “some” … The people need to know!

Salamat Po,
Ako Pa Rin

P.S.

Ano po ba ibig sabihin ng ABS-CBN news website kapag sa ilalim ng article nakalagay ay: -With a report from Bernie Franco, ABS-CBN.com. Ibig sabihin po ba nito ay si Bernie Franco din ang nagsulat, or tumulong magsulat, or nagprovide ng information?

Just bought Don Watson’s new title, Bendable Learnings (Random House). Watson continues his crusade against the pervasive lingo of modern management speak. He’s at his best when he’s poking fun at it. Humour is often the most effective instrument for bursting bubbles of hubris, pomposity and camouflage that uses faux competence to hide mediocrity.

I wonder how Jesus and his disciples would have conversed using contemporary management argot?  Mark 10:35-45 presents an opportunity. See if you can translate it back into everyday English!

The Submission of staff operatives, James and John

Staff operatives James and John, moved forward, and proposed, “Training facilitator, please action a request we will select from a broad range of parameters and submit for approval. “ And he said to them, “What do you want me to action in terms of benefits?” And they said to him,” Create a Key Performance Indicator that grants us an outcome of becoming prime staff operatives when strategy accomplishments are realised.” But Jesus said to them, “Your comprehension platform is sub-standard. Are you able to overcome the comparative tables of potablity and immersion in key performance indicators that are incompatible with management principles.” They replied, “We are able.” Then Jesus said to them, “You will indeed meet the KPIs of potability and immersion, but outcomes of the appointment of prime staff operatives must remain accessible to our total staff and customer base.

When the ten heard this, they began to exercise leverage against James and John. So Jesus called them and said to them, “You assess that amongst the customer base of very broad value pools that chief executive officers regulate entire end-to end governance and that managers pinpoint quality/process outputs with views to strategic termination. But it is not so amongst my staff operatives. Whoever wishes to be a prime staff operative must be a deliverer of basic commodities. For the Progeny of Human Resources came not to receive basic commodities but to deliver basic commodities, and to donate his energies as bonus compensation for the customer base.”

As one of the blogosphere’s true thought leaders, I was wondering who else claims this atttribute. In my mind I imagine the world of thought leaderhip is something like this graph, where the people who think the most talk the most about thinking, and the circus chisellers who haven’t had an original idea in years mostly shut the **** up about it:

First stop: the top 10 of the BusinessWeek Most Innovative Companies 2009. Searching for mentions of thought leadership on their corporate web sites I was sadly disappointed. Toyota, Nintendo and Nokia had no mention of thought leadership at all. Google, a company that often seems so enthusiastic about its cleverness that it could eat itself, had but a single mention, as did HP. Research in Motion managed four thought leaderships. Apple clocked up 32 mentions – but then I found out that they were all the titles of iTunes Podcasts, and so they don’t really count. Microsoft upped the average with 96 mentions.

Only IBM goes big on claiming thought leadership, with 887 mentions of the phrase – but that’s because it’s a job title in IBM. But cut IBM some slack! That’s only one mention for every five patents the company was awarded in 2008 (the most patents in the US for the gazillionth year in a row), or 177 for every Nobel prize an IBM employee has won. That’s quite a lot of thought with which to lead, I think we can agree.

I note also that, while innovation leader number 10 Wal-Mart couldn’t find any actual mentions of thought leadership on its web site, it helpfully suggested partial matches – the top one of which was an excellent Transformers Revenge of the Fallen Autobot ($35 plus postage, in stock). We can only marvel at its desperation to make a sale, no matter how irelevant, to absolutely anyone who visits its site.

So, to reliably find people who will claim thought leadership, I needed to look further down the innovationary league table. I went to the natural home of the barely innovative: that’s right, I searched for thought leaders in the last couple of days of posts on PR Newswire. Bingo! You can keep your Nobel prizes IBM, here’s the motherlode. A few highlights:

You’ll be delighted to hear that thought leader Bentley Introduces Timely Value-Creative Subscription Innovations to Help Sustain the Infrastructure Professions.

When we think about thought leaders in pharmacy benefit management, of course we think of Prime Therapeutics LLC, which Receives 2010 TIPPS Certification for Adherence to High Transparency Standards.

If you are a thought leader in the hotly-contested wound care field, the newly-announced Systagenix Medical Advisory Board is for you.

The comprehensively-named Everything Channel has announced that it will launch a new sub-group group within Channelweb Connect. “We hope that this new group will help drive conversation with thought leaders in the solution provider community,” it says. A must for fans of sub-group groups.

So you might find this graph of innovation against claim to thought leadership is a more accurate reflection of the world in which we live:

Note that I’ve marked an area which combines minimum thought and maximum bragging as the STFU zone. If you’re in this zone and are thinking about farting out another press release about thought leadership, take the hint.

Don’t know if you caught the the news from the Marist Institute in New York last week that Americans find whatever to be the most irritating phrase in the language. It even beat my particular favourite, at the end of the day, and left going forward in the dust.

A company spokesperson declines to comment

I’m talking about the unjustified no commenting which translates as “we know something that would be helpful to you if we told you it, we’re just choosing not to tell you it”. There were about 30 of these in the British press alone last week – and that’s just the ones that got reported.

I’m not saying that every question needs an answer. There are plenty of good reasons for not commenting. There might be legal restrictions, or you might need to keep something secret until a particular day for commercial reasons. That’s your business, I’m not your boss. But what really irks me is a no comment either when there’s a clear public interest to be served or a clear business reason to comment – because, for example, it shows respect for angry customers.

Controlling politicians and public servants are in the first category. Listening to Radio 4 – PM, or especially The World at One – it sometimes seems that every other story ends up with Eddie Mair or Martha Kearney saying “we asked the government for comment but they told us that no one was available”. It’s the worst kind of whateverism. What they mean is, “You might have a point, and we don’t want to talk to you for exactly that reason”. It’s openly admitting that self-interest comes before accountability.

The second category is made up of fools who think that talking to the media should only be done when they have something to sell, and that the rest of the time that journalists are useful idiots who can be ignored. Sometimes it’s uncomfortable to give comment when people aren’t going to tell you you’re wonderful, but that doesn’t mean it’s a bad idea to fess up.

If you are in my lazy fool category, I have two reasons you’re an idiot:

1. People don’t automatically need and respect you any more just because you are director of X for company Y. Readers and viewers are not likely to say that’s all right then, he’s obviously too busy working in my interest, it’s not for the likes of us to question the powers that be. If you want to work in that environment, it’s best to build a time machine and set it for 1952.
2. You’re not my only source. If there’s a real problem that you’re refusing to comment on, you can ignore the conversation – but nowadays we’ll have the the conversation without you, thanks. There are literally millions of sources of news out there, and thanks to blogs, chatrooms and YouTube, saying no comment to one journalist doesn’t kill a story like it did in the good old days. You’ve still got 20 one-star reviews on Amazon whether you decide to comment or not.

It doesn’t help when idiot spokespeople copy politicians, even fictional ones. Every time someone raises an eyebrow and uses the quote from the political drama House of Cards to me, “you might think that, I couldn’t possibly comment,” I just want to punch them in their smug faces.

If more spokespeople just started saying, “yeah, like, whatever” instead of their elaborate excuses not to communicate, the world would be a more honest place. And it would open up new opportunities in corporate communications for feral teenagers, where their demographic is scandalously under-represented.

An early example of an American person reaching out

Note to American readers: I’m not having a pop. The phrase is quite poetic. Satisfied yearnings, a sense of shared destiny, that sort of thing. It’s just that to British ears it’s a bit much when all I’ve done is ask for five minutes on the phone with the product marketing manager.

I’ve been back in Factiva, looking at how often we talk about reaching out at each end of our special relationship. Here are the results: a graph of how often reach out is mentioned in the news pages of magazines and newspapers in each country. It is clear that British people are saying hey! don’t go there, about the phrase. At least we would, if we knew what it meant:

Americans are currently about three times as likely to reach out, and when you look deeper into the data, many of the examples in British publications involve grey (gray)-import reaching out: US news articles republished in the UK. The Phillips Weasel Index shows that reaching out isn’t currently trending upwards in the US, but it’s pretty firmly embedded, as you can see.

In the UK things are different. We don’t like reaching out much now, but back in the 1980s we didn’t do it at all. When I couldn’t find a single mention in 1980 I thought it must have been due to a small sample size, so I took five-year blocks. And when I looked at the mentions one-by-one, the mentions of reaching out were almost all in imported features. We have never been, it seems, a nation of reach-outers. Look at the graph between 1980 and 2000:

There are two competing explanations for this. Maybe we Brits aren’t swayed by faddy and meaningless psychobabble and so we prefer descriptions of business communication that don’t pretend that some emotional need is being satisfied by doing our tedious, underpaid jobs. Or maybe we’re just snooty and emotionally repressed.

Part of the solution. Or the problem

This week there’s an example of the first one – I’m one of the experts on Black Market Britain, ITV, 10.35pm on 6 October (if you’re reading it on Monday, that’s tomorrow night, set your Sky Plus). I’d love to tell you what I say, but it’s been stuck in legal for such a long time that when they called me to tell me the transmission date, I’d clean forgotten the interview.

It won’t make what I’ve said obsolete. The anti-counterfeiting/anti-piracy business has a sort of Groundhog Day consistency. The people whose job it is to market anti-counterfeiting (at least 30 organisations, last time I counted), all say the same thing every year. Their figures are pretty consistent, because they’re more or less made up by these organisations for the purpose of lobbying. The terrific work done by journalist Felix Salmon here and here to highlight this deserves to be recognised, not least by other journalists. “The fact is that the statistics AREN’T generated, as opposed to simply conjured out of thin air,” he told me.

I used some of these stats in my book, and I now know I should have asked more questions. What troubles me more is what goes on at the conferences organised by the people who come up with the stats, and the law-makers that they lobby. It’s not that they’re making agreements in secret that are undemocratic, unaccountable and might have negative impacts for developing countries – they have the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement for that. It’s what’s never mentioned that bothers me.

Almost all anti-counterfeiting and anti-piracy conferences I have attended, and it’s quite a few by now, are from the group hug school of conferences: experts quote their own figures (and each other) and lament the state of the problem, but no one involved will blame anyone who might be in the room, for example. And so it goes on: an identical conference, with the same people involved and a different sponsor, will be held a few months later in a different hotel.

Talk Normal’s going to get on to the appallingly low standard of trade conferences as soon as I get the time. But for now I’m thinking about something that Felix Salmon said to me:

It never ceases to astonish me what the press will print if it’s asserted with enough bravado from a self-styled expert.

It occurs to me that on this subject I’ve occasionally been both the credulous hack and the self-styled expert. I’m hoping that I’m neither on Tuesday night.

Wikipedia’s meditation on weasel words:

Weasel words are statements that are intentionally evasive, ambiguous or misleading. On Wikipedia, the term refers specifically to words or phrases that seemingly support statements, but which fail to attribute opinions to any verifiable sources. Weasel words present an apparent force of authority without allowing the reader to decide whether the source of the opinion is reliable. If a statement can’t stand without weasel words, it does not express a neutral point of view; either a source for the statement should be found, or the statement should be removed. If, on the other hand, a statement can stand without such words, their inclusion may undermine its neutrality, and the statement will generally be better off without them.

From “The Language of Advertising Claims,” by Jeffrey Schrank:

A person unaware of advertising’s claim on him or her is precisely the one most defenseless against the adwriter’s attack. Advertisers delight in an audience which believes ads to be harmless nonsense, for such an audience is rendered defenseless by its belief that there is no attack taking place. The purpose of a classroom study of advertising is to raise the level of awareness about the persuasive techniques used in ads. One way to do this is to analyze ads in microscopic detail. Ads can be studied to detect their psychological hooks, they can be used to gauge values and hidden desires of the common person, they can be studied for their use of symbols, color, and imagery. But perhaps the simplest and most direct way to study ads is through an analysis of the language of the advertising claim. The “claim” is the verbal or print part of an ad that makes some claim of superiority for the product being advertised. After studying claims, students should be able to recognize those that are misleading and accept as useful information those that are true. A few of these claims are downright lies, some are honest statements about a truly superior product, but most fit into the category of neither bold lies nor helpful consumer information. They balance on the narrow line between truth and falsehood by a careful choice of words.

A press release

I thought it was about time that Talk Normal sent out a press release. I don’t have anything to talk about, but that hasn’t stopped PR companies from sending me thousands of press releases in the past, so look at this as part of some ineffective passive-aggressive retaliation.

Anyway, having received almost half a million press releases in my life, I gave the project several seconds of thought before coming up with:

Talk Normal expands Solution Portfolio with new Solution Modules

Talk Normal (http://talknormal.co.uk), the leading web site for people who want to communicate more effectively with coworkers, today announces the Talk Normal Interaction Effectiveness Solution. The solution consists of a series of discrete modules which together effectively enhance your ability to provide effective interactions end-to-end in your business, and facilitate improved interaction.

“Talk Normal has always set out to be significantly customer-focussed,” chief solution advocate Tim Phillips says, “with our solution we can take this to another level.”

The solution is free to view by visiting http://bit.ly/124lr, and is available immediately.

###
About Talk Normal
Talk Normal (http://talknormal.co.uk) is the leading web site for people who want to communicate more effectively with coworkers. Its chief solution advocate is Tim Phillips.

Contact
Tim Phillips, chief solution advocate
tim@talknormal.co.uk
020 3287 9248

I thought, maybe someone who does this for a living could tell me what you think of my style (with hindsight I could have punched up the bit where I called it a web site. Information portal? Content repository?) but luckily there’s a free web site to tell me how effective my release would be as a marketing tool: http://pressrelease.grader.com/. Paste your release and the robot at HubSpot automatically writes you a report.

I’ve now got my report. It tells me that I need to vary the links a bit more for search engine optimisation and my press release should be at least twice as long, as I’m sure you agree. But it’s not all bad news: the report told me that This release contains 0 words that are considered gobbledygook.

I support anything that gives us better press releases, especially as so many of them reach the pages of magazines virtually untouched these days. But if the HubSpot robot is interfacing with my information portal, and it genuinely wants to facilitate improved interaction, I’d suggest tightening that gobbledygook filter a bit.

I don’t think I have issues, and I don’t think you should either.

Just as the US government rebranded the War on Terror as The Fight for a Better World in 2005, so many of us have abandoned the real, truthful yet uncomfortable word problem, and substituted the blandly depressing issue instead. It’s the worst type of weasel word.

What’s my evidence? I did a bit of fishing around on Factiva, the database almost all published articles in the English language. Around 1988 the word issue popped up about as often as the word problem, which is not surprising – there are many legitimate uses of the word. But like a linguistic grey squirrel, issue has been quietly taking over. Here’s a graph of the number of times, in UK-based corporate, industry and economics news sources, that the words problem and issue occur every 1000 articles:

The sample size is getting on for a million articles a year, so it’s pretty reliable.

In case you’re looking at the graph and thinking “the curves aren’t that steep”, look at what experts will one day call the Phillips Weasel Index (PWI) – the ratio of times that the weasel word “issue” is used compared to “problem”:

As you can see, in 10 years the ratio has more than doubled. There are now almost three and a half issues per problem. Twenty years ago, the issue/problem PWI was 1.18 – slightly more than one issue per problem. And this is in magazines and newspapers, where people are employed specifically to delete this type of language abuse. In everyday language, I’m guessing the PWI is much higher.

There are several possible explanations. Perhaps there are more issues now, and fewer problems. No, I’m not buying that either. Perhaps we are more interested in writing about our issues now, and less interested in our problems? There’s no evidence for that in the subject matter: we’ve never been more obesessed with the problems of doing business. Maybe it’s the declining standard of copy editing that’s to blame?

I think what’s occurring is a stealthy rebranding: the word problem has become too emotionally loaded to be uttered in polite company in case we think bad things about the companies responsible. So software bugs are now issues rather than problems, even if they stop our computers working and ruin our day.

We now have performance issues with staff who fall asleep on their keyboard, or brand issues with companies that nobody likes, or, worst of all, balance sheet issues.

Rebrand the language all you like to make yourselves feel secure, but on the first anniversary of the collapse of Lehman Brothers, let’s remember: whether your company admits to balance sheet issues or problems, it still might be time to send your CV out.

Please god, someone get us out of the this recession quick. I don’t think I can stand to hear anyone else telling me to do more with less.

If you’re ever short of something to say in a meeting, just try I think we should be doing more with less. It sounds insightful but doesn’t actually tie you into doing anything, and so it is perfect for most of these occasions.

Saying that it’s good to do more with less is a bit like saying that world peace is a good thing. Of course it is. I’d be far more interested in speaking to someone who disagrees; but that’s a different post.

I gave myself five minutes to find examples of how far this virus has spread. The results, in no particular order:

The Harvard Business Review has solved the problem, but nobody told the guys in the Ice cream business.

Apparently it is good to be innovative in Forbes, which is not suprising considering the impact on owl animation.

Conferences: an entire Google summit (you missed it) and people at the The Institute of Directors conference: more hope, optimism and even great excitement – with less money.

Marketing: more branding for less. Just what the world needs.

Doing more with less on holiday, which doesn’t sound like much of a holiday to me.

And finally, a warning that It’s easier said than done to do more with less.

Well on this evidence it’s definitely easier said, that’s for sure.

This junk food is now, officially, a better choice

Weasel words are taking over, in my opinion, and it is a dangerous thing for all of us. Journalists contribute to the problem by accepting and repeating weasel words, but we all do the same thing in our own way.

At work, a knucklehead who wouldn’t recognize a creative opportunity if it danced a jig in front of him, is merely responsible for “sub-optimizing” his department. He didn’t blow a golden opportunity, he sub-optimized it.

The brutal morons who strap explosives to their bodies and decimate innocent people at vegetable markets in Iraq are “insurgents.” Sure they are.

The Taliban are also referred to as militants, as in this Los Angeles Times article. The dictionary definition of militant is “engaged in combat.” The Taliban do not engage in combat. They are cowards who plant roadside bombs and ambush people from behind the cover of civilians. They intimidate women, children, and old men. They are not combatants, they are thugs. If we need a word that journalists can adopt, I propose “brutalists.”  I define a brutalist as a person who suffers from a morbid, mindless state of moral degradation and whose actions are not bounded by conscience or character. That is the person who wears an explosive vest to the flower market.

The food industry in this county has decided to create a masquerade to distract people from the fact that they sell junk food for breakfast. The story is reported today in The New York Times. Eileen T. Kennedy is a dean at Tufts University, and she has taken the lead on the campaign to deceive the public relying principally on weasel words to do her work for her. Froot Loops, a garish concoction designed to fool children, is now considered “a better choice” for breakfast. It’s better than, say, a glazed doughnut. Doughnuts contain more fat and less vitamin C. Weasel words. She said:

“You’re rushing around, you’re trying to think about healthy eating for your kids and you have a choice between a doughnut and a cereal,” Dr. Kennedy said, evoking a hypothetical parent in the supermarket. “So Froot Loops is a better choice.”

We are caught up in a “jobless recovery.” In my mind a recovery consists of putting people to work. A jobless recovery is not a recovery. I scolded The New York Times in a recent post for putting this absurd phrase in print and taking it at face value.

The use of weasel words is intensifying. Weasel words give weak, phoney, and evil people a place to hide. Let’s take away their hiding places by challenging their weasel words, and for our children’s sake, let’s not use these words ourselves.

For those of you who listen to Desert Island Discs, you’ll know that when the celebrities go to their imaginary desert island, they are allowed to take the Bible plus one other book. It’s only a matter of time until someone chooses their corporate briefing book.

If you who don’t know what a briefing book looks like:

It’s one thing for the Prime Minister to have a big book with details of everything from knife crime crackdowns to puffin colonies with him at prime minister’s questions. It’s quite another for a product manager to be unable to speak without reading the lines from a company’s messaging document.

The messaging document is the greatest enemy of Talknormalism today. I don’t believe they should all be burned in the metaphorical town square. I’ll even concede that companies have to have consistent messages, and a way to send those out.

The problem isn’t the idea of the document, but what’s done with it.

First, communications departments keen to justify their existence bloat the document on the assumption that 50 pages of advice is better than five pages, offering an answer for every question and a mantra for every situation. If you have gone to this trouble, it often follows that everyone should follow the document to the letter.

But compiling a big document by committee – which is how it’s done – means it’s very difficult to say anything of value. As soon as you do, someone’s going to edit it. If you’re contributing to one of these, it’s not in your interest to stick your neck out.

Sadly, some journalists are focussed entirely on performing interviews by email, allowing the guardians of the book to simply cut and paste dull answers into the reply, attributing it to some director or other, without going to the hassle of even consulting them.

The result? A growth in the number of spokespeople who are corporate speak-your-weight machines. And some who don’t even know what has been said in their name.