A masterpiece from the jungle

Ihave a treat for you. It’s only a couple of sentences long but I think it may be a masterpiece. Like all masterpieces it distils something to its essence. That something is corporate language. Many years ago, when pterodactyls still swept across the skies of Lyttelton, I wrote a column about corporate language. I said it came in two main varieties: bombast and euphemism. Bombast sought to impress the listener with high-flown jargon, while euphemism sought to mask the nasty truth, like a knitted cover over the spare toilet roll.

Only the bosses used such language. Underlings never spoke of mission-critical paradigms or remuneration packages, because they had no need to impress and nothing to hide. Instead they used the language of the everyday, the simple nouns and verbs of reality.

Writing the column clarified my own mind. When I finished I pushed my chair back from the desk and slapped my hands together in the universal gesture of ‘‘there, that’s that dealt with’’.

In response to the column I got plenty of letters. Most correspondents offered examples of corporate language from their own line of work and you could sense their pleasure at getting the filth off their chests. So I wrote a second column quoting examples I’d been sent. That, I thought to myself, should settle the matter. What boss was now going to dare to stand up and talk of leveraging synergies or rationalising human resource requirements?

The answer, it turned out, was all of them. The corporate world carried on just as before. Euphemisms continued to drip from the tongue and bombast to boom from the airwaves. And the reasons were not far to seek.

The corporate world’s a Darwinian jungle. A corporation exists to do one thing only, which is to make money at the expense of others and thus to continue to exist. If it fails to do that it goes under. So it doesn’t pay to be nice.

But it does pay to seem nice. Customers like nice. Which explains the difference between the nice insurance company you see advertised and the one you actually get to deal with. It also explains the abundance of euphemism. Euphemism is a pretty wrapping on the dog-eatdog world of business.

The bombast is equally explicable. In the Darwinian scramble for the top job, anything you can do to daunt others or to impress them with the appearance of knowledge is an advantage to be seized. Which brings us neatly to the masterpiece.

Its author is the chief executive officer of McClatchy, a traditional media company in the US. These are tough times for traditional media companies. Big new beasts like Facebook and Google have arisen in the jungle and stolen their lunch. So McClatchy, like many a similar company round the world, is losing money and shedding staff. No CEO likes to shed staff, not because he loves his employees but because his god is growth.

If a business isn’t growing it’s dying. Shedding staff is an admission of mortality. So it is euphemised. It becomes rationalising, or streamlining, or reprioritising.

The McClatchy CEO, however, found a whole new way of saying it. Reportedly he emailed employees to say about 10 per cent of them would be offered voluntary buyouts. The reason: ‘‘It is important to us that [employees] are empowered to make the next steps on their career path’’. You have to admire that. But he hadn’t finished yet.

After the euphemism, the bombast. The buyouts, said the CEO, would be steering the company toward a ‘‘functionally based organisational structure in targeted strategic areas’’.

Sometimes you can only stand back and applaud.