Kairon Gnothi

By Seth Godin

It’s easy to make fun of business clichés. Tempting to string a bunch together in a blog post or a memo and show how clever you are. Harder, though, to avoid using them.

I think they exist to hide. By providing a layer of insulation between what you say and the truth, you can avoid saying what you mean, avoid confrontation and avoid change. Clichés make it easy to talk without really saying anything. Clichés make it easy to hide and to lie.

Does anyone really think Karl Rove is going off to spend more time with his family? Does he even know the names of the people in his family? Did the people at Ford Motor really drop everything to make quality job one, or was it just marketing tinsel?

The few people who actually mean it when they use clichés are now frustrated because no one believes them any more. The entire lexicon is discredited.

Let’s save time and effort and say what we mean. Here’s my start on finding the best of the worst: The Encyclopedia of Business Cliches. Feel free to robustisize it.

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Comment by Kitty

I am not mistaken. Seth Godin is smart. I like to read his writing, and now it seems he knows clearly why his readers like him.

Cliches are important for most employees in multi-national companies in China. The cliches we encounter are not as easy as examples raised by Seth, “Best Practices”, “Synergy” (I do hate this one), “Think Big”, “Think outside the Box”, and so on. In China We are facing jargons actually.

“Today is a busy day. I spent threes hours preparing SAP for QPM and made 3 copies of PPP. I talked with C4 manager about our NPL.” or “This year our slogan is ’4 pigs’, and the year before was ’4 dogs’, and even before that we talked about ‘FAST’, and we are carrying out AGP now.”

These jargons help a company against spies, as I always believe. If I meet someone in the office asking for sensitive information, I will chat using these jargons to judge whether this is a unfamiliar colleague or a spy, since strangers to this company, like you the reader, surely can not figure out what I am talking about. Jargons are useful, aren’t they? Any new comers to this company must read the “Abbreviation Bible” first to understand what him/herself is doing as well as what others are doing. Setting barriers against communication, that is the meaning.

As I developed interest in Marketing, jargons become something unavoidable. An interesting phenomena is that the less sense one has with Marketing, the more cliches and jargons one uses. I cited Seth Godin’s articles several times in my blog, for the reason that he talks simple. So does David Ogilvy in his confession. So do Al Ries and Philip Kotler in their master works. First class marketers conclude their experience and form concepts; third class marketers cite those concepts again and again and again until turning them into jargons and cliches.

It is difficult to find good marketing articles written by Chinese. It is easy to find good collectors of jargons and cliches. Web 2.0, Virus Marketing, the Blue Ocean, SWOT, 5C, 4P (5P, 9P, 11P and so on), User Experience, Stickiness, Position, Target, Image, Segment, Move My Cheese, Six Think Hats…sometimes these English words are embodied into Chinses articles like shining diamonds on the walls of a pigsty, and sometimes English jargons are translated into Chinese jargons- which is even more terrible. These articles provide valuable information to let you know the best-sellers and concept fads in this season, but they do not deliver any sense- you have to go back to read those abused master pieces to catch on what the articles are talking about.

And thus sense and simplicity finally win.