I was a staff industrial engineer in a multinational consumer goods corporation and I was in a meeting with two (2) senior accountants. We were discussing why the budget for operating expenses was going up for the department I was assigned to.
Whenever I replied to questions about expenses, both accountants would huddle and talk among themselves, and I wouldn’t understand a word they were saying. They used a variety of accounting terms as they discussed “effect on liabilities, debits & credits to other accounts, & profitability spreadsheet calculations.”
I just sat there watching them and thinking “what were they saying and why do accountants talk like that?”
Years later, I’d get what accountants would be talking about as I moved to smaller businesses and took more responsibilities. (I speculate that the accountants in the multinational corporation were looking for ways to window-dress their products’ costs, i.e., hide them and make the products look more profitable).
Self-proclaimed social media gurus sometimes tend to use barely understandable words when they communicate or sell themselves as experts. A blogger, for example, brags about supply chains that:
“..spot bottlenecks forming weeks before they materialize, rebalance thousands of inventory nodes simultaneously, and turn strategic planning from a months-long cycle into real-time optimization.”
Say what?
It’s hard enough that new employees need to learn the languages of their peers in the departments they would work in. People already have enough difficulties understanding one another given all the languages & dialects around the world.
When it comes to communication, we should be guided by one acronym: KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid).
Ellery's Essays 