A word from the Executive Vice-President of Word-Processing Initiatives

I sometimes have fantasies about what the killer title to have on my business card would be. Most of us do this, usually in the context of imagining bumping into an odious former boss, or the girl who used to pick on us on the school bus when we were five. "How am I doing? Oh, fine, here's my card, we must have lunch together".... and with a samurai flash of card displaying a title that left no room for doubt as to your importance and wealth, you would completely destroy their self-worth.

The problem is that very few titles actually pass muster. There is something rather laughable about being Chairman and Founder of a company that only includes yourself. And at the opposite end of the spectrum, I met someone yesterday who introduced himself as Vice-President of Strategic Initiatives for the Industry Business Line.

He had recently been promoted and was clearly extremely pleased with himself. I didn't like to point out that:

1) Vice-President of Strategic Initiatives implies there is likely to be a president, a senior vice-president or even an executive vice-president also in charge of strategic initiatives. That sounds like a lot of people in charge of some initiatives.

2) What are strategic initiatives anyway? They sound pretty lame. A strategy has oomph. A programme at least sounds concrete. Initiatives sound like lots of people sitting around in a room talking about whether or not something is a good idea, which, let's face it, if there are three vice-presidents in charge of the same thing is likely to be true.

The golden rule is that no title should be longer than three words, otherwise it isn't a proper job. Chief Executive - only two words. Chairman - even better, only one. (Marketing & Communications Director is just about ok, but only if you cheat and don't count the ampersand).

Of course this is heresy to most senior company executives, or indeed Americans, who are all senior vice-president of something. There is also a theory that in a recession, companies can't give people pay rises so they try fobbing them off with fancy titles instead. My advice is, don't fall for the trick. Demand the extra cash.

And if you do want to argue a title change, go simple. My absolute favourite is the head of the National Theatre. He's simply called The Director. What else do you need?

How to speak estate agent

I haven’t written for a while because I’m buying an apartment. I say “buying”. I actually mean shopping. The inner fishwife in me loves looking around other people’s apartments. Sometimes, you get good design ideas: the rest of the time you can gasp at their terrible taste.

It also brings you into frequent contact with estate agents, a strange breed who, I am starting to realise, are pretty similar both sides of the Channel. Crucially, they have their own language. So in the absence of any deep insights into corporate communications, this week I’m serving up the guide to estate agent speak - in London and Paris:

Charmant	Extremely small.
Atypique	The shower is in the kitchen.
-ette	Kitchenette. Cuisinette. Studette. Whatever the language, “-ette” translates as “unliveably small”.
Bijou	London estate agent term for “charmant”.
Has potential	Start learning about plumbing, now.
Good investment	Don’t even think about trying to live there.
Coup de coeur assure!	The owners are in the middle of a messy divorce and need to sell this apartment immediately.
Vaste	Anything over 35m2*. Still considered unliveably small by anyone who has the social misfortune to live outside the Periphérique.
Sans perte de place /  bon agencement	“The number of square metres might look terrible, but this apartment really is worth the extra €20,000”.
…Village	As in, “Abbeville Village”,“Harringay Village”… Description for a small row of shops including Sainsbury’s Local and Starbuck’s used by London estate agents to play into every tired urbanite’s dream of the rural idyll where Mum and Dad live.
…Borders	Highbury Borders is Finsbury Park. Hampstead Borders is Finchley Road. If it’s bordering, it isn’t actually there.
Dans quartier en pleine restructuration	Gangland.
Recently regenerated area	Some prostitutes and drug pushers by the tube station, but a few gay interior designers have recently moved in.

*Paris estate agents – and Parisian buyers – are completely obsessed with square meterage. This is because the difference between a large apartment and a small apartment is a washing machine. Don’t even think about a dishwasher: these are for people living in the provinces.

New Year’s resolutions : cutting out the fat

A lot of people you talk to at this time of year have one big objective: to end 2013 thinner than they started it. In real life this involves a dispiriting programme of limp salad and mineral water, usually disappearing mid-February into an orgy of leftover Christmas chocolates and red wine.

But when it comes to communications, losing the flab is definitely worth doing, and with a bit of effort, it can be maintained all year.

This is on my mind particularly at the moment because I’ve been helping structure a series of presentations and plenary sessions for my company’s senior management conference in March. Inevitably, this means lots of time on Powerpoint. I have a personal hatred of Powerpoint. It’s the microwave oven equivalent of communications – in theory, you can do anything with it, but in practice, the result is usually overcooked, tasteless and flabby.

So based on the last week’s experience, here are my top tips for cooking up the perfect Powerpoint presentation:

• Think about what you want people to take away. Research shows over and over again that people can’t absorb more than four to five key messages at best, and long-term, they’ll probably retain only one. This isn’t anything to do with intelligence- many of the brainiest people are also the ones with the least time on their hands, and therefore the least likely to concentrate unless they think it’s worth their while.
• Separate what you want to say from the way you want to say it. There are three elements in a slide presentation: your message, your slide and your notes. Your slide and your notes are there to support your message, not replace it. Find a way to present the most important points graphically – can you use a picture or a chart?
• Tell a story: don’t just present information. All good stories have a beginning, a middle and an end. Start by giving an overview of the main points you plan to cover and provide a recap at the end. The ‘moral’ of your story is what you want people to take away. The need to refocus on a business line in response to a competitor’s offer is arguably less enticing than having to kiss lots of frogs before meeting a handsome prince, but the principle is the same.
• Use a checklist and cut ruthlessly: a maximum of five key points, supported by relevant examples and figures in the presentation as a whole; one slide for one idea, explained in a maximum of two minutes and no more than three bullet points per slide, with 6-10 words per bullet point.
• Finally, avoid death by Powerpoint:  People are more likely to remember ideas if they are presented in different ways. Is there anything you can use to explain your ideas other than a slide e.g. a prop, or a short video? Some of the best presenters don’t use slides at all – think Steve Jobs in his famous product launch setpieces. However, take a reality check: if you get nervous in front of an audience, or if people don’t want to sit next to you at dinner parties because they think you’re boring, don’t do it.

In fact the best Powerpoint presentation isn't like a microwave at all. It's more like a miniskirt. Long enough to cover the essentials, but short enough to be interesting.

Seasons greetings- or how to offend people before the year's even begun

In case you hadn't noticed, it's nearly Christmas. I say you might not have noticed because in London, by this stage of December, most people are living on a diet of champagne and Berocca, with lunch sliding via a few office mince pies into a dinner where everyone seems to be wearing the same semi-ironic Santa hat procured from some dodgy stall on Oxford Street. But this being Paris, a few tasteful lights have gone up near the local mairie, your office colleagues will be grumbling that they have to use up some of their obscenely large holiday allowance to go shopping for presents, and otherwise it's business as usual.

That is, apart from the cartes de voeux. In a country that tends to do things the right way round when it comes to religion (no RE lessons at school: lots of public holidays for religious festivals) the end of year cards are something of an institution.

And so, a large pile arrived on my desk last week. Corporately tasteful, carefully avoiding any potentially offensive allusion to religion, they sat there accusingly while I tried to work out who should benefit from my seasonal wishes.

What I hadn't banked on was the steady trickle of colleagues asking me what they should write in their cards. It began last Wednesday. "I want to say, 'Que cette nouvelle année vous apporte la réussite dans tout ce que vous entreprenez, que le bonheur soit au rendez-vous dans vos cœurs et dans ceux de vos proches.' How do you say this in English?"

You don't. You really don't. If you were to write to a business contact that you hoped they succeeded in everything they undertook, and that happiness would reign in their hearts and those of their loved ones, they would probably never work with you again on the grounds you had clearly gone bonkers. 

Day two wasn't much better. "Que cette année soit pour vous source de réussites et de joies" is marginally less verbose, but wishing that next year will be a source of success and many joys seems to imply your contact may be expecting twins.

When I explain this, people are puzzled and disappointed.
-"But what should I say instead?
-Merry Christmas.
-Can it not be a little longer and nicer?
-How about, 'Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year'?"

They don't believe me. I may even lose my crown as oracle-of-all-things-English. And I haven't even written my own cards yet. Maybe I'll wish my English contacts a 2013 that rhymes with prosperity, health and joy and my French contacts seasons greetings. Then I won't have to send any next year.

Is a picture really worth a thousand words?

I’m about to say something that threatens my employability, or at least the figure in front of the zeros on my payslip each month. Design is more important than words. You can write the sharpest prose imaginable: if it’s badly presented, it will look sloppy and unprofessional.

Of course the reverse is also true: stylish design spattered with verbose nonsense smacks of all fur coat and no knickers. But it at least has the advantage that it looks ok from a distance.

I got to thinking about this because a designer friend of mine pointed out that while she likes what I write, she finds the black background makes it difficult to read the words. In a blog about communicating clearly, I’ve committed the cardinal sin of letting the design get in the way of the message.

I have a feeble excuse for this: it’s because I couldn’t think of a suitable picture to put at the top. The problem is that pictures come with immediate associations. A word’s meaning can be fluid, capricious, bent to the context it’s used in, in combination with other words. A picture leaps out of the screen and claims the meaning for itself. For this blog (broadly Anglo-French, focusing on language, corporate communication and translation) a picture of lots of flags might do the trick – except that flags make you think of politics. A picture of London? Finance. Paris? One of those blogs about Anglo-Saxons discovering smelly cheese and sexy people. Tower of Babylon? Too academic, un-corporate.

Bad design is worse than no design at all. It can cheapen, distort or constrict in a way that the odd badly-chosen adjective cannot. It plays the lead role in forming the reader’s first impression (and given that in the age of social media most people have the attention span of a gnat, this may well turn out to be the only impression they form.) And yes, I know there’s no such thing as “no design” – the minute you choose Helvetica over Arial or white background over black, you become a designer – but let’s say the potential for gaffes is lower than if you start sticking your holiday snaps at the top of the page.

Of course design is about more than pictures – the very best design is so much an extension of the structure and essence of the message that the user barely notices it. But I’m definitely not there yet. So if you think of a decent picture and a nice background colour I can use, please let me know.

“Do you speak Globlish?” (or the perils of phrasal verbs)

This week’s post was supposed to be a Part Two of last week’s musings on corporate storytelling, but I’ve been sidetracked. After spending much of the last three days developing an internal video project aimed at our managers around the world, I’ve been giving a lot of thought to what type of English you need to use for a global audience.

The problem raised its ugly head early on in the process. The film involves a dozen or so employees – French, Italian, Indian, German and British - delivering lines to camera. Most of the people watching it will not speak English as a first language. If this sounds something like the joke about an Englishman, an Italian and a Frenchman walk into a bar, that’s because it is.

Most discussions on the ‘type’ of English to use in corporate communications are variations on the age-old British versus American English debate. Everyone has their own rules. Mine is that if your audience is Western Europe, go with British; if you’re widening it out to the rest of Europe, American wins out marginally; and if your audience is global, then only American will do. Above all, choose one and stick to it: there’s nothing more irritating to a linguistic pedant than a piece of writing schizophrenically spattered with ‘z’s and ‘s’s. It’s one of the reasons I hate the Paris metro.

In fact the real language of international English is not American English at all. It’s Globlish. Using American English as a starting point, you need to eliminate all the vocabulary and structures that get in the way of a non-native speaker understanding what you’re trying to say. At a basic level, this means getting rid of cultural references masquerading as words. (For example, the French describe sticky tape as “Scotch”. The English call it “Sellotape”. Why? Because the two rival brands got a foothold in each country at a different time). You also need to shorten sentences – although this is good practice anyway. But the real holy grail is complete elimination of phrasal verbs.

You may not even have heard of phrasal verbs if you’re a native speaker. When you were growing up, you probably got away with learning no grammar, looking up the odd term in the dictionary when you were looking to impress someone, and generally you’d get away with it.

As a non-native speaker… well, after years of painstaking study, you probably still wouldn’t understand that last sentence.

Make up, run out, set up… English is full of dastardly combinations of deceptively simple verbs and prepositions which mean something entirely different when strung together. So whereas passing out might be the unfortunate consequence of a typically British bout of binge-drinking, passing away is altogether more serious.

As a global communicator you need to banish these words from your vocabulary. This is very hard, because most native speakers, when urged to make things simple, fall back on Anglo-Saxon vocabulary, which is mainly made up of… that’s right, phrasal verbs. It’s one of the irritating reasons that foreigners often understand other foreigners speaking English better than they understand the real thing. To speak Globlish is to tread the fine dividing line between straightforward, simple English and the easy Latinate alternatives – “tolerate” instead of “put up with” for example - that, used excessively, will catapult your writing into a bizarre Franglish translation.

How not to tell your corporate story: the sausage factory test

I went to an event the other night where someone asked what my company did. I started trotting out the standard spiel before I realised, after 30 seconds, their eyes had glazed over. I stopped. "You see that chair? Whether or not it's safe to sit on - the material, the design, the way it's put together - will have been checked by one of the engineers from my company. Not only that, but the boat it arrived in from China, the factory it was made in, and the working conditions of the people who made it, will also have been checked by us. In fact, pretty much everything you use, every day, will have been checked by someone from my company or a company like it".

I can't pretend this flash of inspiration started an in-depth conversation about the values of conformity assessment. However it did get me thinking just how badly most companies tell their corporate stories.

Most companies grasp the idea that the homepage of the corporate website is not the place for a 1000-word essay on the intricacies of their business model and the complex drivers behind their markets. They understand that you should be able to say what you want to say in a couple of sentences. Yet when they put pen to paper, any real explanation of what they do, or the value it brings to their customers tends to go out of the window. I came across the following example in the About Us section of a FTSE100 company the other day:

“We are a leading global company that continues to be financially, operationally and strategically strong, and poised for growth".

All well and good, but it gives absolutely no indication of who they are or what they do. The second sentence continues:

“We strive to foster a culture that values and rewards exemplary ethical standards, personal and corporate integrity and respect for others".

Other than the rather questionable assumption that a giant corporation should be handing out brownie points for personal integrity, the main problem with this sentence is that you have no idea whether the people in question are miners, bankers or hairdressers. In fact this is a classic example of a company description that fails the all-important “sausage factory test”.

There are two versions of the sausage factory test. Level One is where without changing any of the words, you could use the same description to describe a sausage factory. In the case of the company above, it would have to be a fairly international sort of sausage factory, perhaps also producing frankfurters and chorizo, and maybe even the odd andouillette, but it definitely stands.

Level Two is where by changing just a couple of words – usually a list of the company’s products or services – you could use the description to describe a sausage factory. Another FTSE100 company – coincidentally one of the first company’s competitors offers:

“X is a Chilean-based copper mining group with interests in transport and water distribution. It is listed on the London Stock Exchange and has been a constituent of the FTSE-100 index since 2004.”

Swap “sausages” for “copper mining” and “pizza and chips” for “transport and water distribution” and….well, you get the picture.

Level Three is where the description does tell you what the company does, but is so packed with generic (sausage factory) words – leading, major, global, plus a string of ultimately meaningless list of figures describing the turnover or number of employees- that you sense an opportunity has been lost to tell the real story. In fact as most companies make it past Levels One and Two, Level Three is the one you really need to worry about. Take the following description from the homepage of a CAC40 company:

“X is the world’s leading steel and mining company. Guided by a philosophy to produce safe, sustainable steel, it is the leading supplier of quality steel products in all major markets including automotive, construction, household appliances and packaging. X operates in 60 countries and employs about 260,000 people worldwide.”

You may think this is unfair. If you’re not Coca-Cola or Apple, in an unglamorous sector and with an unevocative name, surely you need to shout from the rooftops that you’re the biggest and best in what you do? My suggestion is don’t blacklist adjectives of the “mine is bigger than yours” variety, or key figures, but attach a warning bell on each: think what you’re trying to say, and whether it really adds anything.

And for those of you who are thinking, “that’s all very well, but what would you put in its place”, the next post will be about how to tell your story once you’ve sat the sausage factory test.

ing out the standard spiel before I realised, after 30 seconds, their eyes had glazed over. I stopped. "You see that chair? Whether or not it's safe to sit on - the material, the design, the way it's put together - will have been checked by one of the engineers from my company. Not only that, but the boat it arrived in from China, the factory it was made in, and the working conditions of the people who made it, will also have been checked by us. In fact, pretty much everything you use, every day, will have been checked by someone from my company or a company like it".

I can't pretend this flash of inspiration started an in-depth conversation about the values of conformity assessment. However it did get me thinking just how badly most companies tell their corporate stories.

Most companies grasp the idea that the homepage of the corporate website is not the place for a 1000-word essay on the intricacies of their business model and the complex drivers behind their markets. They understand that you should be able to say what you want to say in a couple of sentences. Yet when they put pen to paper, any real explanation of what they do, or the value it brings to their customers tends to go out of the window. I came across the following example in the About Us section of a FTSE100 company the other day:

"We are a leading global company that continues to be financially, operationally and strategically strong, and poised for growth".

All well and good, but it gives absolutely no indication of who they are or what they do. The second sentence continues:

"We strive to foster a culture that values and rewards exemplary ethical standards, personal and corporate integrity and respect for others".

Other than the rather questionable assumption that a giant corporation should be handing out brownie points for personal integrity, the main problem with this sentence is that you have no idea whether the people in question are miners, bankers or hairdressers. In fact this is a classic example of a company description that fails the all-important “sausage factory test”.

There are two versions of the sausage factory test. Level One is where without changing any of the words, you could use the same description to describe a sausage factory. In the case of the company above, it would have to be a fairly international sort of sausage factory, perhaps also producing frankfurters and chorizo, and maybe even the odd andouillette, but it definitely stands.

Level Two is where by changing just a couple of words – usually a list of the company’s products or services – you could use the description to describe a sausage factory. Another FTSE100 company – coincidentally one of the first company’s competitors offers:

“X is a Chilean-based copper mining group with interests in transport and water distribution. It is listed on the London Stock Exchange and has been a constituent of the FTSE-100 index since 2004.”

Swap “sausages” for “copper mining” and “pizza and chips” for “transport and water distribution” and….well, you get the picture.

Level Three is where the description does tell you what the company does, but is so packed with generic (sausage factory) words – leading, major, global, plus a string of ultimately meaningless list of figures describing the turnover or number of employees- that you sense an opportunity has been lost to tell the real story. In fact as most companies make it past Levels One and Two, Level Three is the one you really need to worry about. Take the following description from the homepage of a CAC40 company:

“X is the world’s leading steel and mining company. Guided by a philosophy to produce safe, sustainable steel, it is the leading supplier of quality steel products in all major markets including automotive, construction, household appliances and packaging. X operates in 60 countries and employs about 260,000 people worldwide.”

You may think this is unfair. If you’re not Coca-Cola or Apple, in an unglamorous sector and with an unevocative name, surely you need to shout from the rooftops that you’re the biggest and best in what you do? My suggestion is don’t blacklist adjectives of the “mine is bigger than yours” variety, or key figures, but attach a warning bell on each: think what you’re trying to say, and whether it really adds anything.

And for those of you who are thinking, “that’s all very well, but what would you put in its place”, the next post will be about how to tell your story once you’ve sat the sausage factory test.