Category: business

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business glossary jargon textbooks

The Most Underrated Business Document

I think it’s the glossary.

I’ve read (and written) more BRDs, MRDs, PRDs, RFPs, agenda notes, and PowerPoint epics than I care to remember, and very few of them have included glossaries. This is too bad, because in many cases, that was the one document I really needed — a list of simple definitions for unfamiliar terminology, names, and the like related to the project/idea/problem at hand. There’s a reason you find one in the back of every textbook.

In my experience, most business ideas and concepts — even technical concepts — are simple enough for a smartish laymen to understand. And your typical company has no shortage of planning meetings dedicated to going over business ideas. Yet confusion runs rampant in corporate life. I blame vocabulary, at least in part (I have to give good ol’ BS top honors).

It’s human not to know some specialized terminology, so you’ll naturally miss words during some presentations and meetings. If you miss enough words, you can’t follow everything the speaker is saying — even if what he’s saying is actually very simple.

When you’re sitting at a conference table, you might not be able to look the word up until later. At that point, you’ve already missed the thread of the discussion. This is especially tricky when you’ve just started a new job, since companies tend to have their own house jargon on top of industry terminology.

In unhealthy teams, corporate psychology can pour gas on the problem. Mastery of terminology is a hard-won advantage at work, and there’s a natural tendency to keep your advantages to yourself. So, some people end up using specialized vocabulary to thump their chest (on an unconscious level, anyway). And if somebody else is confused by an unfamiliar term, he may not ask for a definition because he thinks it would be a sign of weakness. (Yes, I’m saying we are all just a bunch of apes with laptops and impressive titles.)

But even putting the psych 101 aside, time constraints and manners encourage this behavior. It feels disruptive to ask a speaker for a definition every 10 seconds.

So, it’s an uphill battle to stop speakers from spewing undefined jargon and encourage listeners to ask for clarification. But it does seem feasible for companies to make glossaries a corporate culture staple. If you’re already printing a stack of handouts for every meeting, why not include a cheat-sheet defining specialized terms, companies, technologies, or people you expect will come up?

It’s a good idea to maintain updated master glossary for each project too, and post it to your project intranet page, if you have one. I’ve seen company-wide glossaries on corporate intranets, which are also great, but they tend to become orphans. Project or team-specific glossaries have a better chance of surviving, in my experience.

I also like to maintain my own personal glossary. When I take meeting notes, I write down any term I don’t fully understand, and scrawl “vocab” next to it in the margin. By the end of every day, I take the time to look up any new terms, and add them to a master glossary I keep on my Backpack page. It’s my own personal “back of the book.” Flash cards optional.

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animation Atelier Transfert business good explanations Stop Motion video

Better Product Pitches Through Stop Motion

In a post on Open Forum, Guy Kawasaki sings the praises of Atelier Transfert’s stop-motion-loaded product videos. As Kawasaki points out, many Web companies fail abysmally at explaining what exactly they do. The Canadian studio’s masterful pieces quickly and clearly define the problems to be solved and the way the products solve them.



Email Center Pro from Atelier Transfert on Vimeo.



Alltop.com Tutorial Video from Atelier Transfert on Vimeo.

Incidentally, according to an online French dictionary, the company name translates to “Transfer Studio.” French speakers, please correct me if I got that wrong.

Here’s a behind-the-scenes peek at how they made the Email Center Pro piece:



A Making-Of: Email Center Pro (the Breakdown of A Sequence) from Atelier Transfert on Vimeo.

They also do recipes:



Startcooking.com Chocolate Chip Cookie Recipe from Atelier Transfert on Vimeo.

Mmm… cookies.

It took me a minute to realize that a big part of the appeal of these is the classic Sesame Street vibe:





[via How to Change the World]

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business good explanations jargon radio This American Life

This American Life vs. Financial Jibber Jabber

This American Life recently broadcast the third installment in their fantastic series of shows explaining our current financial mess. All three episodes are available for free online:

  1. The Giant Pool of Money
  2. Another Frightening Show About the Economy
  3. Bad Bank

This article from the American Journalism Review notes that the series impressed even government big wigs. Montana Senator Max Baucus and Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner apparently sang its praises during a congressional hearing last week. Baucus would like government officals to follow T.A.L.’s example and explain themselves better. Hear hear!

The article also quotes Alex Blumberg, the producer who spearheaded the series. This insight sure rings true to me:

Blumberg thinks part of the formula’s success is not getting caught up in the jargon. “We have outsider status. We are not a business program, and we were never a business program,” Blumberg says, admitting that before he started the project he was as ignorant as the next person about the intricacies of high finance.

“The one thing I do have expertise in is figuring out how to tell a story. All these storytelling tricks we have learned over the years we have brought to bear in the same way,” Blumberg says.

When you’re breaking down a difficult subject for a general audience, a non-expert storyteller is usually the best explainer for the job. If you’ve just learned something yourself, you’re better able to relate to the audience. You know what they know and don’t know, and where the most confusing hurdles are.

Dave found the story via @jayrosen_nyu, who is wondering why the established press isn’t capturing the market for good news explainers. Excellent question.

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bad explanations business jargon This American Life

Economic Meltdown Scapegoat #87: Jargon

It would be a huge stretch to blame our current economic troubles entirely on jargon, but it did play a part.

I’m thinking specifically about the mortgage bubble. I’ve brought three houses, and every time, I was overwhelmed by the unnecessarily cryptic language involved. The vast majority of people who buy and sell houses aren’t lawyers or mortgage brokers, yet all the paperwork seems designed to mystify any non-expert.

And of course, it partly is. If you can confuse somebody, it will be easier to talk them into giving you more money. The Truth in Lending Act requires lenders to provide the buyer with the terms of the loan, but, through the power of jargon, they can make that disclosure murky and intimidating. (If you’ve never been through the home-buying wringer, check out this glossary to see what I mean.)

In short, the baffling language of loans helped create an environment where many home buyers feel like they have no prayer of making sense of it all, so they just have to take an expert’s word for it. In most cases, the nearest experts are the mortgage broker and the real estate age, both of whom have (or rather, had) an economic incentive in buyers borrowing more money than is prudent.

You see similar problems in other industries. Crooked mechanics spew enough ominous car jargon that you just pay the bill to make it all go away. Mediocre programmers turn on the tech talk to explain away glitches to their non-techy clients and coworkers. Hurried doctors hurl perplexing medical terms to push you toward their preferred course of treatment.

Jargon isn’t inherently bad, of course. Among experts, it makes communication much more efficient. But more often than not, jargon that spills out into the world of non-experts is repressive. People use it as a tool to tip others off balance and make them feel small. And even if you’re not the devious sort, it’s easy to do this accidentally unless you check your jargon levels vigilantly.

(While on this subject of mortgages, let me be the zillionth explaining nerd to point to “The Giant Pool of Money” from This American Life)

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bad explanations business explaining tricks

Explanatory Filenames

Here’s an Andy-Rooneyish pet peeve: filenames and subject lines that don’t take the intended audience into account.

Do you know what I hate?

For example, let’s say you’re responding to a request for proposal (RFP) for a project called The Annihilatrix. What filename do you choose for your proposal when you email it to the potential client?

In my experience, even some big agencies will call it Annihilatrix_Proposal.pdf or something similar. If you’re working on proposals for multiple possible clients, this is a logical way to keep track of all of them. But think about the guy on the other end who receives proposals from 10 different candidates on the deadline day, all with the same filename. The first thing he has to do is rename each of them. If you’re thinking about your audience, you’d save the proposal with your company’s name in the filename — e.g. TomCo-Annihilatrix_Proposal.pdf.

There are many such opportunities for better explanations in business. For example, the subject line “Marketing Plan” isn’t very helpful if you’re emaling the head of the marketing department. She might be dealing with a dozen marketing plans for different projects.

Practicing good explanation even in the small matters can really make life easier for your oh-so-busy colleagues. Pay it forward.