Words to the Wise: Cut the Buzz, Know What’s What

A detective laments to his wife that he’s running into one roadblock after another on a case. He’s sure he’s identified the murderer, but can’t prove it.

“Think laterally,” the detective’s wife says.

“What does that mean?” he asks.

“I don’t know. You’re always saying that to me,” she replies.

It’s a moment of comic relief at a tense moment, yet it reflects something that we often see in business: a catchphrase or buzzword that gets repeated because it’s in vogue without people really understanding what they’re saying.

A friend once perfectly captured the essence of such a buzzword: “It’s a word that at first seems vague, but, in fact, is completely meaningless.”

When people say they’re “digital-first,” what do they mean? They post on Twitter frequently? They respond to email before they check their regular mail? They buy e-books and if they like them, buy the hardback for their bookcase?

If they talk about working on the “cutting edge” or, yuck, “bleeding edge,” how so? The implication is that they’re ahead of something. Yet a colleague of mine was at a meeting where people repeatedly talked about a “cutting edge” marketing program: They were buying their corporation’s first ads on Facebook. Really. Their “cutting edge” clearly gets sharpened at a different establishment than the “cutting edge” at, for example, NASA.

So when you hear people using words and phrases you might not understand, ask them to explain it—not to embarrass anybody by calling them out, but to find out what they think it means. It might lead to an interesting discussion, and maybe even help everyone to agree on what they’re really trying to do. It might even trigger some mental gymnastics as the team decides what it means.

A big part of getting safely to a destination is knowing where you’re headed in the first place.