Physician, Heal Thyself; Deloitte Consulting Grassroots Effort Takes Aim at Consulting Jargon.

Business Editors

NEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE)--June 17, 2003

"When an entire profession becomes an endless source of Dilbert material," says Brian Fugere, partner, Deloitte Consulting, "you know it's time for a change." According to Mr. Fugere, that's why the

"We're just as guilty as the next guy when it comes to using words like paradigm, bandwidth, and leverage," says Mr. Fugere. "But we're getting better, and we're committed to straight talk as a way of doing business."

Deloitte's marketing department had been touting straight talk for some time when Texas-based consultant Paul Keene challenged them to get serious about it, and "create an application to filter out bull."

The marketing department responded, assembling five of the firm's own consultants to create such a tool. Chelsea Hardaway, who headed up the underground effort, describes the 10-month project as being "conceived and created by our people, for our people. If you look up bull in the dictionary, you'll find a picture of a consultant. So who better to lead the charge against it?"

The result? Bullfighter, a helpful utility that runs in Microsoft Word and PowerPoint, checks for jargon, offers alternative language, and gives every document a score.

Now Deloitte consultants who fancy endless sentences sprinkled with multi-syllabic words, or who populate their documents with heaps of jargon, can count on a good humored lashing from Bullfighter. And in conversations, the consultants hold each other to the "no bull" standard with a friendly flogging any time a Bull word is used.

To populate Bullfighter's dictionary, Deloitte launched the "Serious Bull Contest" inside the firm. Within three weeks, nearly 10,000 submissions and 5,000 unique bull words were suggested. Pittsburgh-based consultant Michelle Sigler alone sent in 832 words. "Leverage" was voted the most hated word, followed by "bandwidth" and "touch base."

The contest's winner, Ruben Hartogs, won a trip to the California Academy of Tauromaquia in San Diego and Mexico for a course in non-lethal bullfighting. A short film of his trip can be found at www.dc.com/bullfighter.

"Bullfighter serves as our online conscience - it's like having your grade school English teacher living in your PC," said Jon Warshawsky, who led the team that developed the application. "Now that I am so aware of jargon, I never use it anymore."

Bullfighter is available for free at www.dc.com/bullfighter.

About Deloitte Consulting

Deloitte Consulting is one of the world's leading management consulting firms, and is known for its straightforward approach to solving today's most complex business challenges. The firm has 15,000 professionals in 31 markets, and serves more than one-third of the companies in the Global Fortune(R) 500. Deloitte Consulting is a part of the Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu global organization and can be found on the Internet at www.dc.com.

    This release was Bull tested:

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Bull Composite Index 6.4
A combined measure
 of jargon and
 reading ease; 1 is
 poor, 10 is
 excellent
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Bull Index            73  Diagnosis:  Basic obscurism skills are
Measure of jargon;         emerging. You are propagating bull, but it
 scale is 1-100;           could be worse. You may have attained this
 higher scores             level through overuse of words like
 indicate less bull.       'global' or by applying system terms
                           ('We'll talk about this offline') to human
                           interactions.
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Flesch Readability    47  Diagnosis: Teetering on the edge of unclear.
Measure of reading         The overall meaning remains discernible,
 ease (Comics = 92;        but it becomes possible to lose oneself in
 Sports Illustrated        corollary thoughts, which may be worth
 = 63; New York            exploration, but which can also detract
 Times = 39)               from the core point of the written article.
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