This post will exceed your expectations

I'd say that in about half of my business conversations, I have almost no idea what other people are saying to me, Dan Pallotta writes.

We have forgotten how to use the real names of real things. Like doorknobs. Instead, people talk about the idea of doorknobs, without actually using the word "doorknob." So a new idea for a doorknob becomes "an innovation in residential access."

And there's the corporate version of Valley Girl speak.

The business version of this illness involves the use of words such as "space," "around," "synergy," and "value-add" with a healthy dose of equivocators like "sort of" and "kind of" to ensure that there is no commitment to anything being said: "I'm in the sort of sustainability space around kind of bringing synergistic value-add to other people's work around this kind of space." Oh, OK, that explains it.

We talk like idiots.

A term that has lost its meaning is "Let's exceed the customer's expectations." Employees who hear it just leave the pep rally, inhabit some kind of temporary dazed intensity, and then go back to doing things exactly the way they did before the speech. 

Customers almost universally never experience their expectations being met, much less exceeded. How can you exceed the customer's expectations if you have no idea what those expectations are? 

I was at a Hilton a few weeks ago. They had taken this absurdity to its logical end. There was a huge sign in the lobby that said, "Our goal is to exceed the customer's expectation." The best way to start would be to take down that bullshit sign that just reminds me, as a customer, how cosmic the gap is between what businesses say and what they do. My expectation is not to have signs around that tell me you want to exceed my expectations.

Get a grip, Dan. It's just value-add.