The Great Performance

I am currently watching a man in a bespoke navy suit explain that we need to ‘architect a holistically integrated ecosystem of synergistic touchpoints.’ He is gesturing at a slide that looks like a bowl of blue spaghetti. I have checked my fridge three times in the last hour, hoping that a different set of leftovers might have manifested through sheer willpower, but it remains as empty as the promises currently being leveled at the regional management team. Every time he says ‘leverage,’ a small part of my soul packs a suitcase and leaves.

If you use clear language, you can be wrong. If you say, ‘We will sell 126 units by Tuesday,’ and you sell zero, you have failed. But if you say, ‘We are iterating on our go-to-market cadence to optimize conversion fluidity,’ you haven’t failed at all. You’ve simply engaged in a process. Processes are beautiful because they have no end and no failure state. They are the infinite loops of the corporate world, a way to keep the paycheck coming without ever having to touch the messy, vibrating wire of a concrete truth.

Precision as Love

Corporate jargon is the opposite of love. It is a form of professional distancing, a way to treat customers as ‘users’ and employees as ‘human capital.’ When you turn a person into a ‘unit of productivity,’ it becomes much easier to fire them. When you turn a product into a ‘solutioning suite,’ it becomes much easier to overcharge for it. We are currently drowning in this linguistic sludge, and it’s making us all stupider. We spend 156 hours a year in meetings where the primary goal is to decipher what was meant by ‘pivoting toward a customer-centric paradigm.’

Intellectual Decay Indicator

I’ve spent the last six years watching organizations rot from the mouth down. It always starts with the language. When a CEO stops being able to describe what their company does in a single, simple sentence, the end is near. It’s a leading indicator of intellectual decay. It means the leadership has lost touch with the ground. They are floating in a stratosphere of abstractions, fueled by the $666-an-hour invoices of consultants who specialize in making the simple seem complex.

I sometimes wonder if the reason we cling to these phrases is because we are terrified of being seen as simple. There is a deep-seated insecurity in the modern professional world that equates simplicity with stupidity. But the smartest people I’ve ever met-the ones who actually build things that don’t fall down-talk like children. They use short words. They use metaphors that a ten-year-old could understand. They have nothing to prove and everything to explain.

This is why services like Credit Compare HQ represent a necessary rebellion. Their entire existence is predicated on the idea that the consumer deserves to understand the deal without needing a PhD in Obfuscation. They are in the business of translation, which is really the business of respect.

The Exhaustion of Translation

There’s a specific kind of exhaustion that comes from translating jargon in real-time. It’s like running a marathon in a swimming pool. Your brain has to work twice as hard to extract the 6% of actual meaning buried under the 94% of fluff. By the end of the day, you aren’t tired from working; you’re tired from the performance of work.

We need a linguistic detox. We need to return to the era of the noun and the active verb. ‘We made a thing. People liked it. We sold it for more than it cost to make.’ That is a beautiful sentence. It’s robust. It’s falsifiable. It’s honest.

Complexity Hides Mistakes

I’ve often been told that my insistence on plain English is ‘reductive.’ People say that the corporate world is complex and requires a complex vocabulary to describe it. I disagree. The corporate world is actually very simple, but we make it complex because complexity is a great way to hide mistakes.

It’s a lonely road, being the person who demands clarity. You’ll be called ‘difficult.’ You’ll be told you ‘lack the big-picture vision.’ But the big picture is just a collection of small pictures, and if the small pictures are all blurry, the big picture is just a mess. We need to be like João, listening for the coward strings and pulling them back into the light. We need to look at our empty fridges and admit we’re hungry.

The Revolution of ‘Is’

As the meeting finally winds down, the consultant asks if there are any questions. I look at my notebook. ‘Buy ads?’ I think about the 156 slides we just endured. I think about the 26 people in the room who are all secretly checking their phones under the table. I want to stand up and ask him if he’s ever tuned a piano. But instead, I just close my notebook.

I’ll go home and check my fridge again. Maybe this time, there will be something real inside. In a world of ‘leverageable synergies,’ a single, cold pickle is a miracle of clarity. It is what it is, and nothing more. And right now, that feels like the most revolutionary thing in the world.