Office jargon -- words not to use

A great article from the BBC on over-used phrases found in today's offices. (Click here for full article.)

A few gems:

1. Going forward

2. Incentivise

3. Low-hanging fruit

It gets better.

Remembering William F. Buckley, Jr.

I was about as unaligned with his political views as one could possibly be but had the privilege of working with him on several occasions as well as sharing a wine-laden lunch that I will never forget.

And despite our differing views I found him to be extremely tolerant of what I thought. This is in stark contrast to today's climate where if you disagree with someone you're viewed to be a person with serious moral or intellectual deficiencies.

When I heard of his passing today I recalled the several times he wrote articles for Yachting where I was editor at the time. When he first called to pitch a story about a sailing trip to the Med I at first thought it was a prank. (I'm sure this must happen to many people like him.) I agreed to the article and several weeks later he brought his laptop to our office, added a few key sentences based on some back issues in our library and then printed out the article. (While he was very much ahead of his time in terms of word processing I was struck but how un productive it was to print the article out and have us re-key it.) Nevertheless, the article made it to print.

However, it didn't happen without a stern rebuke. During the final editing process one word was changed and Buckley called up all steamed that we had completely ruined the story. It didn't seem like that big a deal at the time but seeing that I was at a disadvantage arguing about words with William F. Buckley I apologized in a letter back to him. Several days later he faxed back the letter with a note saying that the whole argument was stupid and let's forget about it.

This all led to a lunch at his house in Stamford that was one of the most fascinating I've ever had. Fearful he would discover my left-wing tendencies I tried to steer the conversation to just sailing and only sailing. Still, after copious amounts of wine and with photos of Nixon, Kissinger and Reagan hanging over my head he did discover my views and while I am absolutely positive I had no influence on him I was duly impressed about how tolerant and gracious he was about my opinions.

After lunch and more wine I realized I needed to crawl home and sleep all this off. He, on the other hand, wandered off to his study to complete a speech he was writing for an appearance at Yale that evening.

Remembering less

I have this theory that with the ubiquity of data it's hard to remember most of it. At least that applies to me.

I find that I come across a lot of good information but because I know I can look it up in the cloud I don't exert myself much and in the end forget the data and forget where to find it. (You can only bookmark so much.)

Stephen Baker's recent post on BusinessWeek.com made me realize I may not be the only one. (Link to full post here.) An excerpt:

Our machines these days maintain and transmit most of our numbers. We don't need to memorize many of them anymore. But since we do still maintain memory capability in our brains, even if it's vestigial, which numbers should we store up there? I'd say a phone number is a good start. People ask for it occasionally. Forms demand it. Social security number would be useful too. Maybe we'll work on that one today.

What is branding?

I've heard countless explanations, most of which are just hot air. Stan Slap (yes, that's his name) had some interesting comments at the May Microsoft CEO Summit on branding that I thought made a lot of sense.

"Branding is creating faith in three groups that absolutely can't be fooled. Your manager culture, your employee culture and your customer culture."

"Branding is not an action, it's a reaction."

"The purpose of branding is not to communicate your intent to the world. Branding is why the world should care."

Slap (hard to write that) argues this is the role of the CEO, not the CMO. It's not a marketing and advertising excercise.

Taking a simple idea and making it complicated

An interesting piece on how professional service firms can do a better job of expressing their most important product -- their ideas.

Besides failing to communicate clearly what they do, poor writing makes firms' prodcuts -- the expertise of their professionals -- appear inferior. Bad writing even plageus professional services firms with the deepest expertise and most effective approaches, making it difficult for prospective clients to see the quality beneath the unattractive packaging.