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Why Business People Speak Like Idiots

A Bullfighter's Guide

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About The Book

An entertaining, wickedly witty, and eminently practical guide to cutting through the swamp of jargon-filled and often meaningless corporate-speak and learning to communicate effectively for those those who want to climb the corporate ladder but refuse to check their personalities at the door.

Every day, we get bombarded by an endless stream of filtered, antiseptic, jargon-filled corporate speak, all of which makes it harder to get heard, harder to be authentic, and definitely harder to have fun.
But it doesn't have to be that way. Why Business People Speak Like Idiots exposes four traps that transform us from funny, honest, and engaging weekend people into boring business stiffs:

-The Obscurity Trap: Death by jargon, TLAs (three-letter acronyms), wordiness and evasiveness. Listeners and readers tune out, and think bad thoughts about whoever unloaded all of this crap on them.
-The Anonymity Trap: Death by templates, standards, and the abandonment of personality in favor of conformity. People like stories and personalities, and business writers seem on a mission to exterminate any trace of either.
-The Hard Sell Trap: Death by perpetual sales mode. Our immune systems have figured out that commercials are garbage, a good time for the brain to slip into idle. But business writers feel like they're not really working unless every sentence is selling something. The result: we all tune out.
-The Irrelevance Trap: Death by generalization and the rise of the presentation-in-a-can. It's the hundreds of pages of statistics that don't make a point. What does the audience want to know?

This is your wake-up call. Personality, humanity, and candor are being sucked out of the workplace. Let the wonks send their empty messages. Yours are going to connect. So grab your cape and sharpen your sword. It's time to fight the bull!

About The Authors

Photo Credit:

Brian Fugere is a recovering jargonaholic. After authoring some of the worst jargon the consulting world has ever seen, he formally admitted his problem and entered a twelve-step program. He is currently in rehab and has been jargon-clean for the last two years. He is a partner at Deloitte Consulting and was formerly its chief marketing officer. Brian lives in Danville, California, with his wife, Gail, and their four children.

Photo Credit:

Chelsea Hardaway is an authenticity nut. She can detect hogwash and spin from a country mile, and has spent her career helping companies trade in the usual corporate gibberish for more honest, human communications. She is the president of Hardaway Productions, a brand and communications consultancy that helps clients cut through the clutter. Previously, she was the global brand director at Deloitte Consulting. Chelsea lives in Half Moon Bay, California.

Photo Credit:

Jon Warshawsky, a former eighth-grade spelling champion, is a manager at Deloitte Consulting and helped start the firm's e-Learning practice. In 2000, he founded Cappuccino, a newsletter covering organizational change and learning. In 2002, Mr. Warshawsky returned to his roots as a grammar curmudgeon and led the development of Bullfighter, the software that quantified idiocy in the world of business writing. He lives in San Diego.

Product Details

  • Publisher: Free Press (March 2, 2005)
  • Length: 192 pages
  • ISBN13: 9780743279680

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Raves and Reviews

"This is a funny, entertaining, readable book about a serious, important, undervalued issue: communication. The way business people talk to each other -- and to the rest of us -- is often inauthentic, deceptive, opaque, and trivial. If you're us, this book will help you decode what they're talking about. If you're them, it will help you find a better, more effective way to get your message across."
-- Tony Schwartz, bestselling coauthor of The Power of Full Engagement and president of The Energy Project

"Why Business People Speak Like Idiots...is one of the surprising ideas and trends that will change the way we work and live in 2005."
-- Fast Company

"There are two reasons why business people refuse to speak in a way the rest of us can understand: fear and peer pressure. This book cuts through both excuses and makes it far more likely that work will actually get done. If you've ever written a memo, you need this book."
-- Seth Godin, bestselling author of Permission Marketing and Purple Cow

"Why Business People Speak Like Idiots follows its own advice. It's blunt, lively and chocablock with personality."
The Wall Street Journal, March 1, 2005

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