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posted by martyb on Monday July 21 2014, @01:34AM   Printer-friendly
from the Fake-Your-Way-To-The-Top dept.

Businessweek brings us news of How to Get Ahead by Speaking Vaguely. Projecting power is incredibly simple: just communicate in abstractions. Details convey weakness.

In one of the seven experiments, participants read quotes from a politician who described an earthquake as killing 120 and injuring 400; later, when he simply said it was a national tragedy, subjects thought he was a better leader.

An author of the study, Cheryl J. Wakslak (University of Southern California), cautions however against meaningless business jargon — words such as "ideaate" and "deliverables" that some workers resort to when trying to seem impressive. "Being completely vague will just make you sound stupid," she explains. "Bulls———is best when it has a kernel of truth in it."

The report was published this month in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology and the full report is available at Using Abstract Language Signals Power (pdf)

 
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  • (Score: 2) by Thexalon on Monday July 21 2014, @04:59PM

    by Thexalon (636) on Monday July 21 2014, @04:59PM (#71879)

    This phenomenon is not hard to explain:

    When you are the boss, one of your most important jobs is to evaluate the work of your subordinates, so that you can make correct decisions about who gets promoted, who gets fired, who gets a raise while remaining in the same post, and so forth. If the boss knows how to do the jobs of the subordinates at least reasonably competently, then s/he has a good sense of the quality of the subordinates, and the result is that this evaluation process is pretty good, and the group that the boss is managing will in fact promote quality and punish incompetence. If the boss doesn't know how to do the jobs of the subordinates, by contrast, then s/he has no good way of knowing who's good and who isn't, and will therefor make their decision based on who seems to be talking the best game.

    Most executives nowadays never did the job of their subordinates, and often don't know how even if they were called upon to do so. Those executives are the ones that are most likely to be hoodwinked. And if you're a less-than-great subordinate, talking vaguely is a useful way to confuse your boss while looking like you know what you're talking about.

    As an aside, to "doers" who are getting shafted, I'd recommend spending some time learning public speaking and writing. That way, on those rare occasions when you are called upon to talk to high muckety-mucks about what you're doing, you will be able to impress them and explain things in ways they can understand. At the very least, describe what you are doing in terms of its effect on users: You aren't "reconfiguring the backup system for automatic failover", you are "ensuring we could recover and get back to work immediately if there were a serious problem". You aren't "adjusting the CSS on the order page", you are "working with the marketing department to make our website more attractive to potential customers".

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