Today I had an interesting and vastly humorous discussion with my company's Chief Strategy Officer about the necessary evil of what I call CorporateSpeak. It's the language that people speak in companies that have at least over 50 employees (I'm just guess-timating on that number, but the Math seems right).
I am not a fan of CorporateSpeak, especially when I'm on the receiving end, but I respect it.
It's a dark gift when one finally masters the art of saying what you want to say without actually having to be direct at all. Coming from an agency that is extremely creative by nature exempts me from ever having to speak cryptically to get my point across to a client or my colleagues or bosses (although my candidness has earned a few raised eyebrows over the years, but that's another story for another day).
To those of you who work for a corporation and answer to 5 layers of management and VPs - I applaud you. Chances are, you have learned the language of the corporate world, or you're at least nodding and smiling, pretending to know what's going on when you're superiors start talking to you from 30,000 feet in the air. Back in the day, a fellow coworker used to "translate" some of my clients for me. We would walk out of meetings and I would feel as if there was a lot of talk, but nothing really said - just a whole lot of beating around the bush. Luckily for me, my translator used to clear things up for me and tell me what transpired in plain English slash Layman's Terms and I would sit there wondering why they didn't just come out and say that in the first place. Sigh.
Discussing this with my CSO today, I found myself partially willing to admit that I just might not be smart enough to make it in the corporate world. But I say/write this laughingly - the truth is I want to learn CorporateSpeak the way American kids want to learn Spanish when their parents send them to summer school in Mexico (so they can communicate with the gorgeous locals).
TEACH ME. Somebody.
The best part of today's conversation deserved a blog entry: and that was my CSO's dramatic reinactment of a past conversation with a top corporate client, laced with CorporateSpeak. I learned a lot and tried to make some mental notes on how I could adopt some of the cryptic, confusing and almost passive agressive tonality his clients took on when they gave feedback on a creative concept gone wrong. CSO told me how his clients tore his work to shreds in the nicest way. "Basically, it's like being bludgeoned by... a teddy bear", he tells me.
I died laughing. And came over to my desk to write this blog for the young professional readers of mine. On one hand, I'm warning you to prepare yourself for a crash course in CorporateSpeak. On the other hand, I'm begging you to start learning this language immediately so that you can follow the conversation and give appropriate feedback. The truth is, I have a couple of corporate-type clients under my belt and it's definitely a "lost in translation" thing for me at times. We're from two different worlds: I come from a creative civilization and they come from a different world full of cubicles and lingo.
With enough years of practice and a Rosetta Stone, maybe, just maybe one day I could pass for a native of their mother tongue.
Tuesday, April 6, 2010
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