Why Business People Speak Like Idiots by Fugere, Hardaway, Warshawsky

• Let’s face it: business today is drowning in bullshit. We try to impress (or confuse) investors with inflated letters to shareholders. We punish customers with intrusive, hype-filled, self-aggrandizing product literature. We send elephantine progress reports to employees that shed less than two watts of light on the big issues or hard truths.
• There is a gigantic disconnect between these real, authentic conversations and the artificial voice of business executives and managers at every level.
• Bull has become the language of business.
• Entire careers can be built on straight talk--precisely because it is so rare.
• The first reason for obscurity is a business idiot’s focus on himself over the reader.
• When obscurity pollutes someone's communications, it’s often because the author’s goal is to impress and not to inform.
• A second reason people fall into the obscurity trap, and ultimately speak like idiots, is a fear of concrete language.
• In business, we like to avoid commitment. Liability scares us, so we add endless phrases to qualify our views on a topic, acknowledging everything from prevailing weather conditions, to the twelve reasons we can’t make a decision now, to the reason we all agree the topic is important, to the reason why decisions in general require a lot of thought, and so on.
• The third move for obscurity is a business idiot’s relentless attempt to romanticize whatever it is that they do for a living.
• The bottom line: Bullshit eats away at your personal capital, while straight talk pays dividends.
• If someone is onto their incompetence, there’s nothing like some indigestible prose to keep everyone off their trail. And it seems that those at the highest levels of the corporate food chain (supposedly the smartest folks around) are the worst offenders.
• Every profession, even professional bowling, has some subset of words that helps its gurus share their genius in a kind of shorthand.
• When you have nothing to say, jargon is the best way to say it.
• Business people have an incredibly difficult time delivering a tough message, and usually find a way to surround the real nuggets of information with layer upon layer of muck.
• Some acronyms are useful and welcome.
• Acronyms for the sake of acronyms breed acrimony and mass confusion.
• Jargon is the foundation of obscurity. It’s only part of the long slide into idiocy, but if you want to connect with your audience and persuade them, word choice is a good place to start.
• So the single most important things you can do to kick the argon habit is to develop a deep and vitriolic hatred of it.
• Length is supposed to imply insight, but usually the opposite is true.
• Beyond shortness in length, the best speakers also seem to get away with  a lot shorter words (those of the one and two syllable variety).
• The real issue with long-windedness is that it prevents you from connecting with your audience.
• Short presentations pack a punch.
• Short sentences are more memorable than long ones.
• One-syllable words build momentum and give the long ones impact.
• Business idiots have become commitaphobe. They live in constant fear of being held accountable for something tangible and throw together generic statements that sound vaguely positive but really say nothing.
• In business, the real epidemic is obscurity. Only the best leaders seem to be able to resist turning into a mound of Jello when it comes time to actually say something that could be taken as a stand.
• One of the major reasons that business people speak like idiots is that they have lost their human voice. We have allowed our personalities to be systematically neutered and spayed into oblivion.
• Businesses love clones because they can all be trained the same way, be paid the same way, and eventually behave the same way. If a clone leaves, a business can always hire another at the same salary.
• Templates steal your opportunity for individual expression. It’s one way of surrendering your creative powers to software, and a sure way to fall into the anonymity trap.
• Avoiding the anonymity trap is all about making a personal connection with your audience. Templates are your enemy. Humour is your ally.
• The polish we apply to all our performances is one of the downfalls of business presentations.
• Scripting is good--but know your script, and then ad lib a bit--just don’t read from it, or people will tune you out.
• People with a sense of humor rise through the ranks faster and earn more money. It’s a sign of self-confidence and security--a sign that you can afford a moment of levity, because you don’t have to hard-sell everyone on your talent.
• Humor defuses conflict, reduces tension, and puts others at ease because sharing a laugh is a sign of friendship, not competition.
• The bottom line: Humor makes us happy, makes people like us more, and ultimately helps us connect with an audience (whether on paper or in person).
• The top reason people avoid humor at work is because it might offend someone, and this isn’t a stup reason.
• Society is think-skinned, as a rule, and it is fashionable to be oppressed. People actually aspire to victimhood, because it’s a great way to retire young and well-off.
• Self-deprecation is indispensable. The more successful you are, the better it works.
• Humor almost always brings some risk, but remember: it’s always, always open season on yourself.
• Storytelling is a key ally in the fight against the tedium trap, but it’s also indispensable when it comes to humor.
• Oddball, seemingly unrelated quotes are a great way to flex your humor.
• The voice is the ultimate weapon in the war on anonymity and the best way to create a relationship.
• If you want to connect with your audience, keep in mind that people hate to be sold to, but they love to buy.
• Hard sell gets in the way and erodes trust.
• People just seem to like an idea better when they think it’s their own.
• There aren’t many leaders who can deliver bad news with candor. The ability to do this well confers a lot of prestige on the messenger. It demands courage, and immediately lets the audience know that you trust them enough to just say what needs to be said.
• The old rule is to never present a problem without a solution. But there’s an even better rule--never present a problem without actually doing something that represents a positive step to fix it.
• Show momentum toward an answer, even if you don’t know what the answer is.
• Authenticity, promptness, and clear action are the stuff that effective apologies are made of.
• Business people who live by denial appear ignorant, egotistical, and dishonest.
• The harder you go on yourself, the easier others will go on you.
• Business idiots spend their lives delivering the fine print to audiences who don’t really care. Sometimes the message is timely and smart, sometimes it’s the usual bill, but whatever--they assume the audience exists to take notes.
• In real life, though, the audine isn’t there to take notes. We’re continually surfing our environment for something cool.
• If you want to connect with an audience, you have to get their attention. Make it relevant. Make it vivid. Make it compelling. Whether you like it or not, you’re in the entertainment business. If you don’t find a way to keep their attention, someone or something else will.
• Back up the assertion with something real and tangible, or don’t bother making it.
• Subtly can be the difference between good communicators and great ones.
• Most business people think their goal is to get people to pay attention. Not bad, but not good enough. Great communicators get people to think.
• Your goal is to create a rapport with an audience, to show them that your thoughts aren’t so different from theirs. You have the same preoccupations, annoyances, and reactions to life that they do, and you care enough to entertain them.
• What you should be worried about is what your audience is worried about.
• One of the biggest reasons business people speak like idiots is that they spend way too much time talking about what’s in their head and not nearly enough time on what might be floating around in the minds of their audience.
• To your audience, everything you say is irrelevant until it touches on something they care about.
• One way to reveal your humanity is to reveal a weakness. Exposing a weakness builds trust and solidarity. It underscores a person’s authenticity.
• The key to success here is to be authentic.
• Sometimes, simple props are all you need to tell a memorable story.
• Storytelling is a fundamental part of being human. We have only a limited capacity to absorb facs, but an enormous capacity to absorb narratives.