Letters

Mind the jargon gap

Re: "Jargon Gap," October, Page 19. 1 find [it] amazing that the acceptance of "jargon" depends on the user's level of authority within a company. A person in a working-level position is forced to reduce the most complicated discussion to some acceptable analogy equivalent

It appears to me that as a management structure becomes more self serving and the quality of the leadership decreases it hides behind "jargon" in an attempt to mask its inadequacies and buy time while it figures out what to do. On the positive side, at least when a company's vocabulary strays from plain English to jargon it should ring a bell to investors and "experts" that the ship has hit rough waters, and "business challenges" may be the inevitable consequence of steerage control factors predominantly driven by aggressive market forces that rely on risk-based strategies with no track record for longterm growth and stability. In other words, the other guy is doing something new and different than the way we've always done it, it's working, and we don't understand enough of what we are doing to either copy it or beat it.