Edward Stephens* says ‘strategy’ and ‘strategic’ are classic examples of business words that are thrown about so much they have lost any meaning.
When a corporate leader ceases to be effective, it is time to retire.
However brilliant they may once have been, there will be a moment when their value has diminished and they need to step aside.
We retire clothes that we once considered elegant, but which now have lost their shape and no longer serve the purpose for which they were bought.
This is the natural course of events.
Strangely, we are reluctant to apply the same discipline to the words we use in business, which can have a dulling effect no less profound than a doddering Chief Executive.
Business today is replete with words that either have lost their meaning or are so bland and shop-soiled they convey nothing.
Take the word ‘strategy’.
A writer for the digital news outlet Quartz found more than 725,000 results when searching LinkedIn for job titles with ‘strategy’.
According to Google’s Ngram Viewer, strategy appeared in writing six times more often in 2008 than it did in 1940.
‘Strategic’ charted a similar rise in literature — and on LinkedIn.
For the past six years, it has made the site’s list of the top 10 overused buzzwords.
Why the overuse? Part of the answer is a desire to impress.
The assumption is that a ‘strategic budget’ sounds more thought-out and important than a budget – that a ‘strategic plan’ is more compelling than a plain old plan.
Why have a hiring plan when you can have a human resources strategy?
Who can resist a strategic review, or being appointed as a strategic adviser, or being asked to consider strategic options, or opening at a strategic location?
However, are budgets and plans and options and reviews only strategic if we say they are?
In almost every instance, deleting ‘strategic’ sacrifices nothing except nine letters.
Executive Director of Global Purchasing for General Motors, Beverly Gaskin, says it well.
“Strategic buying is like an oxymoron. If you’re doing anything in the buying field that isn’t strategic, you shouldn’t be doing it,” Ms Gaskin says.
This overuse of the word has led to a kind of chronic fatigue from which there is unlikely to be a recovery.
Other once-useful words have also been drained of their meaning and now face the same inexorable decline to nothingness.
‘Literally’, for example, has seen its definition altered beyond repair.
Now, ‘literally’ can mean an exaggerated way to emphasise a statement or description.
In other words, literally can now mean not literally at all.
The overuse of ‘strategy’, though, is starting to bear negative consequences, hence the need for its retirement.
Firstly it promotes a general confusion around what a strategy is and what it isn’t.
A vision is where you want to go, a mission is what you want to achieve, a strategy details how you’ll get there, and tactics are how you’ll enact the strategy.
They can overlap and reinforce one another, certainly, but these words — vision, mission, strategy, tactics — are not interchangeable.
We know that strategies are important, hence all the books and job titles, but they become laughably meaningless when everything and anything is called a strategy or labelled strategic.
The ‘strategy’ and ‘strategic’ flood is also typical of the inauthentic, woollen language that pollutes and weakens corporate communications.
That’s the second problem: For far too many consumers and employees, straight talk remains elusive and business speak all too common.
Not a good approach to build trust and credibility, which everyone agrees is both valuable and in short supply.
“The great enemy of clear language is insincerity,” George Orwell wrote in 1946.
“When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms.”
Progress, on any meaningful scale, is unlikely while ‘strategy’ remains unchallenged in its current role.
‘Strategy’ has become part of the clutter of business.
It no longer serves the need for which it was intended.
It is time to part ways, as it seems the co-founder of Southwest Airlines, Herb Kelleher has already done.
“Strategy is overrated, simply doing stuff is underrated,” Mr Kelleher said.
“We have a strategic plan. It’s called doing things.”
* Edward Stephens is the Deputy Editor at the Brunswick Review, a journal read in 68 countries. He can be contacted at www.brunswickgroup.com
This article originally appeared in the Words Issue of the Brunswick Review.
