How to Take the BS Out of Business Speak | Bob Wiltfong | TED

I am fluent in the language of BS,

otherwise known as business speak or bullshit,

depending on your point of view.

What is BS or business speak?

Business speak is the language we use on the job and only on the job

to describe and define things.

For instance, at home, I might say to my son,

"It's time to go. Are you ready?"

While at work, I'm more likely to say to a colleague,

"Is it scalable? You can give me a baseline ETA on departure.

(Laughter)

We need to leave ASAP."

Right?

I was first introduced to the language of BS through my wife.

She's a chief marketing officer for a global consulting firm,

and one day a few years back at home,

she was doing a conference call on speaker,

and she started to use the language of BS.

I had never heard this woman speak this language before.

I was concerned she was a spy.

(Laughter)

She used terms like "boil the ocean," "tiger team", "SWOT analysis."

Afterwards, she translated those terms to me

in phrases that a human being can actually understand.

And I did what every good partner does in a solid marriage.

I made fun of those words ...

(Laughter)

relentlessly.

I may not make as much money as my wife's colleagues,

I certainly don't have the degrees they do,

but I know a messed up thing when I hear it.

(Laughter)

And I devoted years of my life

to compiling, researching

and then writing a BS dictionary.

Yes. Thank you. Thank you.

(Applause)

I can now tell my kids that an auditorium full of people applauded me

for all this worthless work I did over the last few years.

So in the words of BS,

with this expertise

I say to you that my presentation to you today,

the CTA of this DIY TEDx Talk, if you will,

is a USP on the rise of BS

in our WIIFM world

and how we can make this intel less scalable

during the fourth industrial revolution.

(Laughter)

If you don't understand what I've just said, that's OK.

You don't speak BS.

(Laughter)

If you do understand what I've just said,

God help you.

(Laughter)

Yes.

(Applause)

So let me give it another shot.

I'll translate that in more common words.

The call to action of my presentation to you

is to make the point that business speak is on the rise in our globalized economy.

But there are simple things we can all do in our day-to-day jobs

with that language

to take the bullshit out of BS.

So what I present to you is three ways

of how to take the BS out of business speak.

First, you've been sitting for a while, so let me poll the room.

I'm going to get your feet working here.

I want you to stomp your feet,

honestly, stomp your feet if you know what the BS term EBITDA means.

(Stomping)

Nice. OK!

Maybe got some CEOs, some accountants in the room.

Never know.

OK, now stomp your feet if you know

what earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization means.

(Stomping)

A little bit more.

To be honest, I'm sure some of you with amortization were like,

"I don't know if I should stomp." Right?

OK, now stomp your feet if you know

what income is before applying accounting and tax write-offs to it.

(Stomping)

That’s a close call, but I’m going to make a judgment call here.

The loudest stomping in this theater

got to the last definition of the same thing.

EBITDA is basically income

before you apply accounting and tax write-offs to it.

And notice that the most common language

got the biggest agreement from this audience.

But here's the problem with BS.

It is not a common language.

Business speak is the language of the elite.

Not surprisingly, when my coauthor and I, Tim Ito,

researched about 300 business speak terms for this dictionary,

one of the recurring themes is the people who created this language

and speak it most fluently.

A large majority of them are people who look like me.

A bunch of white guys.

I say that’s not surprisingly,

because I want you to think the first and second industrial revolution,

when white guys like John D. Rockefeller

and Andrew Carnegie ruled the business world.

And it's true today when research shows

that 90 percent of all worldwide Fortune 500 company CEOs

are white guys, still.

So here's a takeaway for you in the room.

If you want to hang with today's white male tycoons,

Bill Gates, Elon Musk,

Jeff Bezos, Warren Buffett,

it would benefit you to get very adept and able to speak BS.

But there's a drawback to that approach.

I have a friend, Emily, who works at a theatre company in the United States.

This theater company does corporate entertainment

and keynote speeches for conferences.

She started her job a few years ago

and had her first big meeting to try to make a sale.

It was with a big oil company in Dallas,

and across the boardroom from her were five old white guys.

And Emily noticed very early on

that they did something very interesting with their language choices.

They started to use BS words that they knew she didn't know.

Now, why would they do that?

Three possible reasons. I talked to Emily. We've worked out some theories.

One, these guys didn't know any better.

An economist, Robin Hogarth had coined the term "the curse of knowledge"

to describe this phenomenon.

It may be simply that they're so expert at their language,

that they don't appreciate anymore what it's like to not know these things.

And they just spoke off the top of their head.

As a corporate consultant for public speaking,

the companies that I work for,

the reason I give them this advice is because of that phenomenon.

I will tell them, If you have a lot of BS in your four walls --

and it could be unique just to your company

or it's just general acronyms

and things you use in the business world --

and you have a new employee,

maybe give them a directory of some of these terms.

So instead of walking into a meeting and smiling and nodding

and then frantically googling afterwards, what the hell does EBITDA mean,

that they'll know.

Second reason why these five oil executives

possibly handled Emily this way:

they wanted to parse out from her how much they knew --

how much she knew about the business.

Instead of asking her directly,

"Excuse me, Emily, can you tell me

how much experience you have in our industry

and let's go from there,"

they used BS as a way to keep Emily and them apart

rather than bring them together.

Third possible reason these oil executives handled it that way:

they were just jerks.

(Laughter)

And Emily thinks that’s the answer.

(Laughter)

Because shortly after her initial conversation,

she brought in a more senior male colleague,

lo and behold, the five oil executives warm up,

they cut out the BS, and a deal is struck shortly thereafter.

So that's something for us to think about

as our first takeaway of how to take the BS out of business speak.

Use BS to be inclusive and not exclusive.

In other words, don't be a jerk.

(Laughter)

If you can explain something in common language,

that's a victory.

The edit is the genius,

not spouting off all these big words.

Which brings me to my second takeaway of how to take BS out of business speak.

Let's get those feet stomping again.

How many of you stomp your feet

if you know what the word "de minimis" means?

(Stomping)

OK, good. I don't feel so alone

because I was a like a lot of you

who did not stomp your feet a few years back.

As was mentioned in my intro,

I used to work for “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.”

For those of you who don't know,

it is a comedy show that's nationally broadcast in America

that satirized the news of the day.

And I was interviewing an accountant

about a tax issue that he used the word "de minimis" to describe.

And I interrupted him right there

and I said, "What? What the F does that mean?"

And he said, "It means small, immaterial. It's insignificant."

To which I said, "Well, why didn't you just say that?"

(Laughter)

And he said in a moment of honesty,

he said, "I just thought it sounded good."

(Laughter)

In reality, it’s kind of a cool word, “de minimis.”

And I'm guilty of doing it, too, especially in a business meeting

where I'm unsure of my status in that room.

I may use EBITDA, right?

Just to show, "Hey, I can hang. I can hang."

(Laughter)

But here's the thing about communication.

You know what's really cool about good communication,

especially in the business world?

It's when you can express fresh ideas without using stale business cliches

and big words that people in the room don't really understand.

So that's my second way to take the BS out of business language.

For you.

To drive this home even further,

a lady that I worked with in my corporate work

works for a big American company, one of the biggest companies in America,

if not the world.

She works for bosses that use a ton of business cliches,

so much so to keep herself sane,

she told me she created homemade BS bingo cards,

(Laughter)

replaced the numbers in the bingo cards

with the phrases that they used over and over again.

So when they turned up the BS in a conference call,

she tuned out and tried to play bingo.

B: Think outside the box.

I: change agent. N: paradigm shift, right?

So these are things for us to think about.

That if we're using BS, a lot of it, in our business speak,

it may be like Shakespeare said, "sound and fury, signifying nothing."

Which brings me to my final takeaway of how to take BS out of business speak.

Let's stick with Shakespeare.

Shakespeare has given us some great BS speak

and stuff that allows itself to exist outside of business speak

in the English language.

"Wild goose chase."

Think about this. Kind of a weird reference.

That's from Shakespeare.

"Break the ice," "in a pickle" -- all from Shakespeare.

The good news is when we hear references like this from Shakespeare,

a lot of us in the world

at least have a little bit of an experience with Shakespeare.

And we have context clues, we can figure it out.

But I want you to think of other cultural touchpoints

that aren't as common as Shakespeare.

I'm going to put up some phrases that are commonly used in America,

and if you know its common origin, just yell it out.

If you're wrong, it's OK.

We'll edit it out of the video.

(Laughter)

"Swing for the fences," "out of left field," "rain check,"

“off base,” “pinch hitter,”

“right off the bat,” anybody know?

(Audience) Baseball!

Baseball! There you go.

I'm going to put up another list of phrases.

Again, you tell me what the common origin is.

"Blind leading the blind,"

"by the skin of your teeth,"

"fly in the ointment,"

"writing is on the wall."

(Audience) The Bible.

The Bible.

I suppose you have a Bible.

You're reading scripture between speakers, like good Christians. OK.

Yeah, you're right.

"No rest for the wicked" also comes from the Bible.

Here's my point.

Think of the global economy now.

And the majority of people on this Earth

don’t have daily experience with American baseball,

and they don't read the Bible.

But you're sitting in a business meeting,

saying, "We have no time, no rest for the wicked."

"The writing is on the wall."

Do they know what you're talking about?

Clap your hands if you've ever heard the American phrase

"drinking the Kool-Aid."

(Applause)

Great. Anybody who clapped their hands, what does it mean?

(Laughter)

It's a --

What's that?

(Unclear voice from the audience)

We'll get there. We'll get there.

(Laughter)

You've read my script. You know where I'm going.

What does "drinking the Kool-Aid" -- What does that mean?

(Audience) Succumbing to peer pressure.

Succumbing to peer pressure. It's kind of in there.

It's accepting something without question.

Just sort of like I did with you guys, saying, "Stomp your feet."

You're just like, "Sure, whatever," right?

Yes. And to the balcony's response,

here's the origin story of "drinking the Kool-Aid."

And the reason why I bring this up

is because it's important to know the origin story of some of our BS.

Jim Jones is a cult leader. He's adorable.

1978. He has a great idea.

All of his hundreds of followers, he's going to give them a delicious drink.

That's wonderful of Jim Jones to do.

He flavors it with something called Flavor Aid,

which is popular at the time.

It's later confused in history

with the more popular flavored drink in America called Kool-Aid.

But Jim made a bad mistake with that Kool-Aid, man.

He'd laced it with cyanide.

Hundreds of followers drink the cyanide and die.

1978. That's the origin story of "drinking the Kool-Aid."

The reason I bring that up is because a European audience,

you're like, "What is Kool-Aid?"

Also, if you're born beyond 1978,

you may not even know what this is.

Who is this guy? What are you talking about?

Mass suicide? A cult with Kool-Aid?

"Drinking the Kool-Aid."

And there are other BS phrases that fall in this category.

We've lost the origin story, it gets muddied.

Think of TED Talk. The internet.

If you type “who founded TED?” or “where did TED come from?,”

it's a person on the internet.

It's Technology, Entertainment, Design.

That's what TED Talks stands for.

Think of the BS phrase "piggyback."

You ever seen two pigs with one pig on its back?

(Laughter)

I haven't either. Here's why.

Because the origin story of this phrase is actually "pick back"

or "pick pack."

But it was so commonly misstated as "piggyback"

that that mispronunciation was adopted, and now it means “piggyback.”

And pigs are like, "What the hell are you talking about?"

(Laughter)

And there are lots more like this.

Because we're up against lunch, I won't bore you with an origin story.

It's a true one, it's horrible,

about the BS phrase "blowing smoke up your ass," for example.

But I won't go there.

(Laughter)

Here's the takeaway out of all of this,

is that BS terms can get lost in translation.

And I want you to think of some of your own cultural BS

that we use around the world.

For example, in America, if a company is without money,

you might say it's broke.

In Italy, you would say it's "in the green."

In Spain, you would say it's "without white," right?

In America, if you're doing a very easy task,

you might say it was "a piece of cake."

In New Zealand, you'd say "Bob's your uncle," right?

If you have a very hard task that will never happen,

in America you would probably say,

"Oh, it'll happen when pigs fly."

In the Netherlands, a Dutch worker would say,

"When the calves dance on the ice."

(Laughter)

And in Russia they would say,

"When a crayfish whistles from the mountaintop."

It means the same thing.

In Japan, if you are doing a work task and you need help,

you're desperate for anybody.

You may say, "I'll adopt cat paws."

In America, if you are given a task that is one day over a long-term project

and man, you're just getting started,

you may say that it’s “a drop in the bucket.”

In China, they have the same idea communicated

through the phrase of "nine cows and only one cow thread."

So those are examples of cultural differences with BS.

And I'd be remiss to leave you for lunch

without calling out some of the regional fondness for food

in your BS, in the German language.

Think of yourself, when you're in a business meeting in Germany

or in Austria, with the German language,

if you want to add your two cents in America, you'd say "two cents."

Here you say, "I want to add my mustard."

(Laughter)

OK? And once you get that mustard,

you want to be “clear as dumpling broth” about what you’re trying to say, right?

You certainly don't want to come across

as somebody who has “tomatoes on their eyes,” you know?

And the last thing you want to do in that scenario

is you don’t want to “talk around the hot porridge.”

OK? Which is the equivalent of “beating around the bush”

with American BS.

I've given you a lot of bullshit over a short amount of time,

so I'm going to wrap it up with a little BS language

and we'll recap here.

In BS, what I am trying to say

is disambiguate the net net of this dog and pony show

for you thought leaders.

(Laughter)

And I'm going to call out the elephant in the room

with the three takeaways here.

First takeaway: use BS to be inclusive, not exclusive.

Second takeaway is to make sure that you express fresh ideas

without stale business cliches

or big words that maybe your audience doesn't really understand.

And then finally appreciate

that a lot of our BS is lost in translation

depending on the audience.

If we can all do this, starting at lunchtime,

think of how little less bullshit there would be in the world.

And what a wonderful thing that would be.

Thank you very much.

(Applause)