Page 65 - The New Articulate Executive_ Look, Act and Sound Like a Leader

56 CREATING THE PERFECT PRESENTATION

economical, and peppered with breezy, everyday clichés, which
can arguably be a mistake in writing but serve as a kind of
shorthand in speaking.
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If you want to resonate, stick to simple, straightforward, muscular
Anglo-Saxon. By contrast, many middle managers, who report to the
people who work for the people in the boardroom, tend to go the
other way, perhaps because they think they sound more professional.
They cultivate the aforementioned corporate “secret handshake”
language that is intended often to draw more attention to themselves
than to what they are actually saying. At the middle management
level, or what is left of middle management, it is sometimes possible
to be lulled into a stupor by a mantra of swarming buzzwords.
The hidden agenda here is obvious, and only a reminder of the
frailties of human nature. When middle managers salt their presen-
tations with the insider language of a particular discipline, what
they are really saying is, “Hey, pay attention to me! I’m a professional
and I’d like to be appreciated.”
So instead of saying, “We ought to spend more money on this
idea in research and development,” which is what you’d likely hear
in the boardroom, the presentation two levels down might sound
something like this: “Regarding the question of viability, it may
indeed be necessary to interface with R&D in terms of measuring
the projected relative scope of the product as it applies to the bottom
line parameters of future sales, to impact our decision-making pro-
cess in order to pro-opt a similar strategic move that could conceiv-
ably be undertaken by a near competitor. . . .”
This may be a tiny exaggeration to make a point, but I have actu-
ally heard and read worse. The irony is that senior managers are
always grateful to hear presentations that are stripped of the burden-
some language baggage they have to put up with every day. I know
because they tell me so. Yet the further irony is that language changes
won’t be happening in a big way anytime soon. The reason is both