One game you don't want to win--make it a New Year's resolution for 2017!

Have you ever played BS Bingo? This is how to play. Create a BINGO card for yourself—a grid with five columns headed B, I, N, G, O and 5 rows of squares underneath. Then, place a big BS in the free play space in the center.

Now fill the boxes with all the overused, cliché words and phrases we succumb to using in our presentations and business conversations.   Then, either go to a presentation or play the game using a presentation you are rehearsing. Every time you hear or read one of the phrases, mark the square until you have BINGO. Bet it won’t take long!

 Here are words and phrases to get you started filling up your card: 

·        Disruptive: disruption used to be a bad thing—by definition, it means something which stops something else from occurring. Now it’s the darling word for everyone, from technology players to politicians. Disruptive is what they all aspire to be—breaking the status quo with something entirely new and forward-thinking. But here’s a clue—not every idea is disruptive, nor should it be. When something is actually revolutionary, explain why it’s new and what it means.  Don’t call ideas disruptive when they are not really, truly ground-breaking.

·        Future-proof: another overused word, often related to technology. Unfortunately, many concepts we call future-proofed, are not.   Telling a client that their present state is a fear tactic that could backfire. Remember the panic over Y2K?  When we were all terrified the world would end because our green screen DOS operating systems weren’t designed to deal with a date starting with a “2?”  I knew people who worked in IT at the time who spent their New Year’s Eve of 1999 at their workplaces, ready to pounce if their systems started crashing at the stroke of midnight.  Somehow systems didn’t implode, revealing that DOS was more future-proofed than anyone thought. I still see it in use today, clunky, but still working. People—especially sales people—who used Y2K as the reason to force a sale of new technology needlessly lost a lot of credibility.

·        Drive and deliver: I confess, I resort to these two words more often than I’d like to admit.  Drive cost savings and efficiencies, deliver future-proofed enhancements (double points for this one!).  Driving is for vehicles or hammering a nail. Deliver belongs to USPS and Amazon. When we produce a result that does what is supposed to do with excellence, that is what we are really trying to communicate.  An occasional insertion of “drive” or “deliver” is OK, but it doesn’t apply to everything we do in business, and both words are so ubiquitous that they’ve lost their punch.

·        Silos: If you work in agriculture, this word makes sense.  It’s the storage facility for various crops, all kept separately to maintain their individual qualities.  In the business world, we too often refer to silos, as in “all of our departments or functions or management are silo’ed” (which isn’t even a word!) . What we’re really bemoaning is that the parts are operating discretely and/or the people are not working as a team, yielding lesser results.    A better way to communicate this is explain explicitly what needs to be done to promote collaboration, open communication and system integration, accelerating the achievement of the desired objective.  

·        Impactful: This is probably one of the lesser overused words that some would quarrel with my including in my list, but this one still grates me.  When I first began my professional career in consumer product marketing at a well-known manufacturer, every report or proposal we submitted had to use very specific company jargon.  I’d aspired to be a journalist and prided myself on my writing, so made-up words and poor grammar were distressing to me.  My reports would include phrases like “the brand extension will positively impact sales by 10%.”  Invariably, my bosses would re-write it with the word “impactful,” which I was pretty certain was not a real word.  If you Google it, you’ll find that there’s still controversy whether it’s real or not, but it’s my personal vow to find alternatives.

·        Shared economy: a euphemism if ever I heard one.  Companies like Uber and Lyfft and AirBnB aren’t sharing the economy with anyone but themselves.   I’ve never met an Uber driver who was getting rich working for them. I’m sure the same can be said for the other vehicle and housing owners who work for these, and similar, companies.  Don’t get me wrong—I think the idea behind using vehicles and lodging that already exist and linking them, via technology, to paying consumers is brilliant, and I’m a customer.  Wish I’d thought of it. But what is shared is not the economy, it’s the deployment of existing assets to generate previously untapped revenue. We need a better description, like “existing asset monetization.” Maybe not as catchy, but more accurate.

·        Partnership: yes, nothing would be better than being kum-ba-yah with all of our clients and colleagues.  Is that really what we are actually striving for? The best vendors have deep and productive relationships with their clients. That is the top of all vendors’ hierarchy of needs. Yet, regardless of how close vendors becomes with their client, they are still outsiders.  Even if they have a company badge or email address or intranet access.  Just ask someone who is a contractor (aka vendor) and is the first to go when cuts are made.  Partnership is a beautiful but unrealistic concept. What’s more genuine is developing a relationship of complete trust and candor.  This enables you to share in the successes with your client and also be better positioned to deliver the not-so-good news, knowing that the relationship will remain strong.

·        Heads up: I admit, I’m a little bit of a geek when it comes to sports.  Ask me about theatre or art or popular culture, and I’m a fount of knowledge.  I’m just not that into athletics. The first time I ever heard the expression “let me give you a heads up,” I had absolutely no idea what they were talking about.  Sheepishly, I asked (my husband, I think, with whom I do have a real partnership and who wouldn’t shame me), and he explained it was a basketball term meaning to give warning that a ball was coming your way. Every situation cannot be a “heads up,” so we need to develop more articulate ways of differentiating a routine situation from an response-required alert.

I could go on and on.  By doing a  brief search of hackneyed business phrases,  I found lots of choices for your BINGO card—low hanging fruit, you can’t boil the ocean, open the kimono, take it offline.  You get the point.

My business resolution for 2017—and I hope yours as well—is to stop winning at BS Bingo. Stop using the same words and phrases as everyone else.  Yes, it’s easy and it’s shorthand that people understand. But it’s also boring and loses the impact you are seeking.  The result is that your communication, whether it’s a conversation or a written report or proposal, will be lumped in with all the others.  Your audience will glaze over your messaging because it’s the same they are getting from everyone else. If you take the extra time to use thoughtful  language,  you will find that your creativity and boldness of expression will set you apart from the competition and get the results you work so hard to achieve. BS BINGO is one game you don’t want to win.  Here's to a "BS Free" 2017!