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Mike
Carruthers:
In business, you know how consultants and managers talk? "We
have an asset-based pipeline that will outdistance the competition
and solidify our contractual assets and blah blah blah blah blah."
Why do people talk like that?
Brian Fugere:
You use 50-cent words to make a 5-cent point because you think
somehow that will make you look more intelligent.
Brian Fugere,
co-author of the book
Why Business People Speak Like Idiots, says there are negative
consequences to all of this junk talk.
Companies that
are full of bull don't perform as well. I've been consulting
for 23 years and when I go into a company and I look at the
way they speak, I know right away how easy or difficult my job
is going to be. If you're not talking straight, you're not an
efficient company.
And this also
has a financial effect.
We looked at
the financial performance. We looked at thousands and thousands
of documents from companies in the Dow 30; speeches, press releases,
marketing material, stuff on their website, and we analyzed
it. And we found that those companies that were straighter talking
companies, over time, outperformed those companies that were
less clear in their communication.
And there is
another interesting consequence to all of this.
What we do, we
try to persuade. That's what we do. We persuade people to hire
us, we persuade people to promote us, and we persuade people
to buy our product. Life is a game of persuasion. And when you
talk like an idiot, you begin to lose the ability to persuade.
You can link
to Brian's website
from ours, somethingyoushouldknow.net.
I'm Mike Carruthers and that's Something You Should Know.
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