The Things You Say, Say Things About You

The trend toward juvenile, aggressive communication among entrepreneurs has implications that go beyond semantics.

Language is a powerful tool. Hardly a revelation I grant you but I wonder if people truly realize the significance of the language they use every day.

My regular readers will be familiar with my ‘Choose Your Words Carefully’ series, in which I’ve attempted to explore the origins, and indeed the effects, of words such as hate, war and epic. This time out I’d like to take a slightly broader view and look at a disturbing trend I’ve been noticing recently (though I’m sure it’s been around for a while): the increasingly aggressive language used in the entrepreneurial community.

In my work as a writer, I encounter a lot of entrepreneurs. I can say with confidence that as a whole, entrepreneurs are honest, hard working and driven — more or less good people. However the language the community uses, particularly online, reveals a disturbing undercurrent — one that people seem mostly unaware of.

I’ve been talking around this long enough, time for some examples. If you take even a cursory glance through the messaging in the entrepreneurial community, you’ll encounter such words and phrases as:

• Dominate
• Destroy
• Crush it
• Killing it

…and so on, ad nauseam.

Rather than sounding powerful and focused (which is, I assume, the point of language like this), it sounds more like the vocabulary of a 10-year old boy, particularly when a successful result is punctuated by the popular but rather baffling epithet, ‘BOOM!’ You’ll note by the way I said a 10-year old boy. That is a significant point, which will become apparent in a moment.

This bellicose verbiage is disturbing for a number of reasons. First of all, business is competitive certainly, but it is not war, despite what some may believe. War is about destroying an enemy’s ability to fight. A business that’s solely focused on destroying their competitor’s ability to compete instead of serving their customers is, if I may be blunt, being run on incompetency. When I hear business people say they want to ‘dominate’ the market, it honestly causes me to question the goals of the company and its leadership.

Of course, there’s another problem with this kind of belligerent language — my earlier comment about it sounding like the words of a 10-year old boy — the sheer ‘macho-ness’ of such communication.

“Steady on Mackenzie. Are you suggesting that women can’t be aggressive or use assertive language?”

Certainly not dear reader. Women are equally as capable of such language as men, though I would argue it’s far less prevalent. However this tendency toward aggressive language also exacerbates a very real problem that exists in almost all levels of business: the double standard around assertive and driven women. Let me explain.

As I’ve tried to show, there’s a certain chic to such boldness and aggressiveness in business… unless of course you’re a woman. An assertive man is considered driven and powerful, while a woman with similar drive and ambition is often thought of as bossy or worse, bitchy. The prevalence of frankly juvenile utterances such as ‘killing it’ and ‘crushing it’ by men only seems to magnify the double standard further.

One last point on this. A common epithet you will often here is ‘Brother.’ It’s used as a greeting between acquaintances in the business community. Taken by itself it seems harmless enough, though when I hear it I often secretly wonder, “Brother? What are you Hulk Hogan?” The interesting thing to note here is that I have never heard anyone refer to a woman as ‘Sister.’ The implication there seems obvious enough, even if its unintentional.

I fear that I’m beginning to descend into the endless and frankly useless spiral of a rant, so please allow me to sum up. The point I’m trying to make here is a relatively simple one. As comedian George Carlin has said and I have often repeated, we think in language, and therefore the quality of our thoughts and ideas can only be as good as the quality of our language. When we use and encourage such absurdly bellicose terminology into our daily speech, the quality of our ideas must surely suffer.

If you’ve read some of my previous essays, you’ll know I’m no fan of the pedantic, lifeless drivel often referred to as ‘professional tone,’ nor am I suggesting that we should all begin speaking to each other like politically correct automatons. Considerate, friendly and frankly human language should do fine in most cases, particularly in business.

I’m also not suggesting that male entrepreneurs are all childish chauvinists. Much of the language and terminology we use is picked up unconsciously because we’re surrounded by it every day, not because of any particular belief system.

In our daily lives, we’re often judged, rightly or wrongly, by the words we use and the implications of those words. The solution is a relatively simple one — be more thoughtful and conscious about the words you use. Think of your audience, and imagine how you might sound to them.

In business, competency and trust is often tied to the way you communicate with customers and other business people. If you sound like an overly-aggressive 10-year old boy, what does that say about you? What does it say about any of us?