On the Origin of Business Jargon.

Introduction

Clearly, language naturally evolves. Always has and always will as each generation adds their own twist. But this is usually an organic process, by which I mean language develops from within. Typically, there are two important factors at play. The first is the contribution which young people play in any language’s evolution. Secondly, it’s usually the users of language themselves who come up with new words and phrases. As I researched the origins of corporate jargon, it was interesting to discover that neither of these two groups had much to do with it. While the former isn’t a big surprise, the second was. Because if businesspeople themselves didn’t come up with half the language they now use, then who did?

Well, I’ll come to that bit in a moment.

The History of Economics

It’s worth pointing out that until the end of the 19th century the closest academic topic to what we now call “business studies” was something called Political Economy. It had been around since the 1750s and was heavily steeped in moral philosophy. It was only in 1862, when William Jevon published “A General Mathematical Theory of Political Economy”, that the term “economics” was even coined. Alfred Marshall’s “Principles of Economics” in 1890 then split politics and economics into separate fields of academic study. It took the UK Parliament’s Joint Stock Companies Act of 1856 and the Companies Act of 1862, (which together originated the concept of public limited companies), to set the scene for the creation of shareholders, annual reports, investor days, IPOs, roadshows, marketing, and a whole lot of other corporate governance which helped spawn the jargon of today.

The Beginnings of Change

Yet, despite this, business language experienced very little change for most of its existence. Businesses had managed to get on perfectly well using the same clear and simple style, vocabulary and tone as normal, everyday language. Admittedly, every industry has always had its own unique terminology, from the medieval blacksmith’s “smelting forge” to a modern day high-frequency trader’s use of “momentum ignition”. ?These defined terms will always have a place in language, typically denoting something which would otherwise have to be explained in far longer terms. It would be wrong to consider them as “jargon”.?

But somewhere around the 1920s, standard business language began to shift. Different professions started to develop their own ways of talking, often adopting fancy language for concepts perfectly well addressed by normal language, making things sound far more specialised than maybe they really were.

Taylorism

So, who started all this jargon stuff?

Well, a number of experts point to one man, a chap named Frederick Winslow Taylor. He was the original management consultant in many ways. Back in 1911, he worked for the Midvale Steel Works in Philadelphia. Having observed a lot of workers often sitting idle at their stations, he penned a book called “The Principles of Scientific Management”, in which he discussed the incurred economic impact and proposed measures to make the workforce more productive.

His rather unrealistic expectations, while mocked later in Charlie Chaplin’s 1936 silent film, Modern Times, were partially adopted, certainly in spirit, by several leading industrialists of the time, including Henry Ford. Ideas of standardisation of process, maximised outputs, accuracy and precision caused a shift in popular thinking that business was more science than a practical humanities discipline.

The Academics

It was not long before academia latched onto this thinking, too. And why not? Taylorism made it appealing to think of business acumen as something that could be taught. Several business schools had recently opened, including the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College. In 1908, Harvard Economics Professor Edwin Gay persuaded the university to begin an MBA programme. He, like others, was a firm believer that scientific methodology could be applied to business. And with academia’s interest came a wave of terminology that catered for business’s desire to quantify and qualify processes and operations scientifically.

The Psychologists

However, by the 1930s, this trend of pushing workers ever harder began to result in tensions between management and employees. The result was a psychologist-led dovetail into the emergence of a suite of human relations related terminology designed to help managers be better managers.

Sports and the Military

It’s no surprise that the world of sports and the military has also greatly influenced business language. We hear these terms frequently at work. Classic metaphors like boiling-the-ocean (as in depth-charging the sea off the back of a destroyer in search of German U-boats), gaining ground, in the trenches, the sales force and front line all have distinctly military undertones. In much the same way, sports terms, often American, also pepper our conversations, like moving the goal posts, touching base, level playing field, slam-dunk, hard ball and game-changers.

The Consultants and Business Schools

By the 1950s, as many large firms began expanding their operations beyond their traditional business, employees increasingly began to feel disconnected from their companies. As a result, management needed ways to help their workers feel better about their jobs. And, once again, academia came to their rescue. Professors at schools like MIT and Carnegie Mellon began developing wholly new specialisations called Organisational Development and Management Science.

This growing emphasis on human psychology and getting more from employees led several management consultants, including famous names like Peter Drucker, to get involved. Over the next few decades, men like Drucker helped numerous large corporations increase worker productivity. Amusingly, as part of Drucker’s work with General Electric CEO Jack Welch, they created a work culture programme called “Work-Out. Despite Welch saying the programme would create “a company where jargon and double-talk are ridiculed, and candour is demanded” it merely resulted in a whole slew of new jargon, much of which quickly spread.

Boom Economics

As time passed, more profit-driven mantras, like that of economist Milton Friedman, began to gain traction within companies through the 1970s. The rise of Wall Street in the 80s brought with it a boom in management consultancy and business schools. Naturally, consultants were fast to develop reams of pseudo-scientific language with which to pitch themselves appealingly to financial services clients, while business schools took it for granted that this emerging new language was the way to speak, and did not challenge it.

Flashy financial jargon like optionality, standard deviation, leverage and value-add, amongst others, quickly made their way into business speak to join classics like synergy (from the Greek roots: “syn-” meaning “together,” and “ergon” meaning “work”) – adapted in 1957 by British psychologist Raymond Cattell to mean people or groups cooperating in a business environment to enhance results, or paradigm shift – as popularised by UC Berkeley philosopher Thomas Kuhn in his 1962 book “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions” and the myriad terms inherited from the tech world, like bandwidth, feedback, capacity, switch-off, work offline or unplug.

And the Contribution of Businesspeople?

What seems striking in all this, given the contributions from management consultancy, science, psychology, sports and the military, is just how little of modern business speak was actually penned by the people doing the business themselves.

What businesspeople did do was keenly adopt all these imported terms and phrases and use them so often many have now become slightly dull cliches. Perhaps because most business had so little jargon of its own industry insiders were quite happy to adopt this kind of specialised language, potentially to distinguish themselves tribally from outsiders, or maybe to make things either easier, more glamorous or more complicated and specialised than perhaps it really is?

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