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BOOK REVIEW: "Why business people speak like idiots," by Brian Fugere, Chelsea Hardaway, and Jon Warshawsky

"The bottom line: Bullshit eats away at your personal capital, while straight talk pays dividends."

This handy little book comes to you from three current or former employees of Deloitte Consulting LLP. According to the authors, intelligent and otherwise-decent business people speak (and write) like idiots when they fall into any of four "traps" of thinking.

THE OBSCURITY TRAP. "Jargon, wordiness, and evasiveness are the active ingredients of modern business-speak." We speak and write like idiots when our goal is to impress rather than communicate, to stay safe hiding behind evasiveness, or to falsely romanticize business. How to escape: Be humble and avoid superlatives; let your business's or product's strengths speak for themselves. Steer clear of acronyms. Keep it short: short presentations, short sentences, short words.

THE ANONYMITY TRAP. "We have allowed our personalities to be systematically neutered and spayed into oblivion. We have business schools that churn out clones; an epidemic of political correctness that demands every sneeze be approved by a 12-person committee; corporate scandals that have eliminated even the slightest appetite for risk; and company standards for everything from presentations and email signatures to clothing and performance ratings. It's no wonder most of us feel that a personality isn't the kind of thing you'd want to bring to work." How to escape: Don't use templates mindlessly. Lose all that polish you worked so hard at; let people know you're human. Learn--and it is something that must be learned--how to use humor. And "pick up the damn phone"--do something, anything to make your communication personal.

THE HARD-SELL TRAP. "Business idiots spout the hard sell all day long. How many value-addeds and empowers can we stick on a page before someone from the state agriculture bureau stops by to confiscate the document for use as fertilizer?" The hard sell happens out of fear (Why would they listen to me if my product's not the best in every way?), habit, and bad role models. How to escape: Don't tell: show. Keep yourself and your greatness out of your communication. Build trust by giving bad news. Apologize swiftly and from the heart when appropriate.

THE TEDIUM TRAP. "There are too many nice people with clear messages who fade into the din of business with no real impact because they didn't realize they were in show business." How to escape: Spice up your communication in authentic ways with language. Talk about things that annoy or embarrass you. Use photos and graphics in interesting ways. Tell a story. Leading Change (1996) by John P. Kotter, had sold 210,000 copies worldwide through 2003. Who Moved My Cheese? (1998) by Spencer Johnson, M.D., with 94 pages (in what the authors call "AARP font"), had sold 14 million copies through 2003 and was still going strong. Why did this little parable so decisively outsell a thoroughly researched business book by a renowned Harvard professor? Because it's a story, and it describes a phenomenon we've all experienced.

More of the authors' sound business communication advice is available at Fight the Bull, including free downloadable Bullfighter software with a jargon database and Bull Composite Index calculator. The web site even has a Mystery Matador feature, allowing site visitors to copy and paste a piece of idiotic business writing into a text box and send it, anonymously, to the author--along with a "jargon and verbosity" score created by the program. A little cowardly, but hey, if that's what it takes to make the world a better place....

BOOK REVIEW: "On Bullshit," by Harry G. Frankfurt

Sic 'em, Harry!

In 1986, Harry G. Frankfurt--currently Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at Princeton University--wrote On Bullshit as an article published in Raritan. In 2005, Princeton University Press published the article as a little 6"x4" book with 67 pages of text. (In 2006 they published Frankfurt's On Truth, but that's a subject for a future post.)

This book is probably placed anonymously on many desks but may not be widely read. I myself just got around to reading it even though I bought it more than a year ago (no, I did not discover it in my in-basket). The loss is mine. Frankfurt's little essay takes us where we desperately need to go.

Frankfurt defines "bullshit"

A truth-teller intends to tell the truth, and a liar intends to tell a lie, but a bullshitter doesn't care whether he's telling the truth or lying. Bullshit has absolutely nothing to do with the facts or the perception of the facts. Bullshit is about only one thing: how the speaker or writer wants people to perceive him.

Is it the truth? Is it a blatant lie? The bullshitter just plain old doesn't give a shit.

So what?

Rampant bullshit is more dangerous than rampant lies. Someone who sets out to lie acknowledges that there is a truth to be avoided. The liar respects and fears the truth. The bullshitter doesn't. A society that accepts bullshit as a way of life loses the ability to tell truth from lies because it doesn't practice that ability.

Why bullshit is pandemic these days

• These days, there is more communication of all types, period.

• These days, sincerity trumps correctness. We've gone from dedication to correctness (Is what I'm saying the truth?) to dedication to sincerity (Do I have really really STRONG EMOTIONS about what I'm saying?) How we feel is more important than what is true. Truth--if, in fact, there is such a thing as "truth"--is relative, so we focus on being "true to ourselves." What can that possibly mean if we acknowledge no truth outside ourselves? This type of bullshit is what bad politicians and lazy advertising agencies manufacture. They aren't lying to us, exactly; they just very sincerely don't care whether or not they're lying.

• These days, we mandate bullshit. "Bullshit is unavoidable whenever circumstances require someone to talk without knowing what he is talking about," says Frankfurt. Everyone today is expected to have an opinion on everything, and the more celebrity one has, the more one is asked to opine. Rosie O'Donnell comments on countries whose names she probably can't even spell. Alec Baldwin and Sean Penn opine on camera about the world's most delicate and deathly problems without giving up their personal comfort, wealth, or freedom. And Monica Lewinsky has graduated from the London School of Economics; her master's thesis is, "In Search of the Impartial Juror: An Exploration of the Third Person Effect and Pre-Trial Publicity." We know this why? Because ten years ago she fellated a U.S. president while he was conducting international business on the phone, so of course the media will seek her opinions for decades.

We beg these people to bullshit us. We reward them when they do and ignore them when they don't. And the one thing a bullshitter can't stand is to be ignored.

In Hermann Hesse's great final novel, The Glass Bead Game, scholars several centuries in the future ridicule the 20th century for being the "Age of Feuilleton": intellectually weak and addicted to sensational journalism rather than serious reading, writing, and thought. We still live in the Age of Feuilleton.

Our mission, if we want less bullshit, is to forgive less bullshit.

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BONUS: go here to read Drew McLellan's great take on how we all built the House of Imus.