After 10 years working for corporations, I have come to despise corporate America. But rather then just proclaim with the fervor of any angry teen why “corporate America sucks,” I’ve decided to collect my thoughts and go into some detail about the major problems I’ve seen and what I think needs to change in the American corporation.

There are so many problems with corporations these days that it’s difficult to figure out where to begin. Almost every aspect of corporate America is screwed up in some way, but I’ll start by naming just a few problems. The American corporation has terrible communications. Most corporations contain an insidious social class structure. There is a loss of personal freedoms in the work place. In my 10 years I’ve noticed a disturbing lack of minorities; yet political correctness has gone awry. Individuality is getting killed off by workplace homogenization. Hiring practices are shameful, and almost as bad as the promoting practices. There is a lack of management skills in today’s managers. Corporations are outsourcing to save money—but paying a larger price for the incompetence that comes with it. Corporate policies force people to work long hours, which often promotes extramarital affairs. And people have literally turned into talking memos.

The focus of Part I is corporate communication. Different forms of corporate communication each have their own unique problems. With marketing communication, companies often miss the mark when trying to explain themselves. Internally, policies and management directives can be written with a condescending tone. And corporate employees tend to speak in unnatural, jargon-filled sentences.

Marketing Communication
American corporations have put together some of the most ambiguous and uninspiring marketing information that I have ever seen. When you go to a company’s web site, you should be able to read on the first page, how it is that the company can help you. Instead, what you will often read is marketing material that fills up an entire page without giving the reader a single clue what the company does or has to offer. Amazingly, there seems to be more of an emphasis on how good the marketing materials sound than on putting together a clearly written message that delivers a coherent explanation of what the company does and how it can help.

Here is an example of a marketing message that fails to provide even a simple overview of the corporation.

ABC is a global management consulting, technology services and outsourcing company. Committed to delivering innovation, ABC collaborates with its clients to help them become high-performance businesses and governments. With deep industry and business process expertise, broad global resources and a proven track record, ABC can mobilize the right people, skills, and technologies to help clients improve their performance.

Wow, that sounds fabulous, now could you tell me what it is you actually DO? That was taken from an actual web site; however I changed the name to protect the innocent. Anyway, this kind of ambiguous corporate marketing is not at all uncommon. It can be seen on either the home page or the about page of many corporate web sites. The problem is that to an intelligent person, this type of ambiguous marketing not only fails at its job of informing the reader about the company, but it sends an entirely different message: “We don’t know how to communicate with our customers.” And that is a message that will no doubt have negative consequences.

Internal Communication
Internal communication has a whole set of different problems. At one company I worked for, I was told that I had to read and then sign some new employee paperwork. One of the documents laid out what my responsibilities were. The responsibilities were written like so:

Attendance Policy - I learned in my supervision that I must report to work on time for my scheduled shift no later than the time I am assigned, and have received a copy of the LGD attendance policy this session.
Positive Self Image – I learned in my supervision that I will interact positively with clients and staff when on duty and will maintain positive work ethics.

It’s difficult to figure out where to begin explaining the problems associated with this document. I will begin with how it’s written.

Generally speaking, how something is said, can be and usually is, just as impactful as what is said. By writing these “rules” out in the first person, the company is essentially putting words into the mouths of every new employee that walks into the organization. There is an underlying message that it sends to people when a company puts words in your mouth and then asks you to sign for those words. The message is “we don’t think you are capable of understanding the responsibilities associated with your job, so we have ‘dumbed it down’ for you in such a way that you can not only understand it, but that it can’t be argued with later on when you screw up.???

The company could have just as easily created a “policies & procedures??? document that outlines what’s expected of staff and that contains a respectful corporate tone, rather than the condescending alternative which blatantly appears to cater to the lowest common denominator.

Not only do I find how this document was written to be personally demeaning, but I found some of its contents to be outright offensive. Instead of just giving me my schedule, a special emphasis was added about reporting to work on time. I had to read and sign off on the fact that “I must report to work on time.???

Again, there is an underlying message that is being sent here, “we doubt that you are capable of understanding the responsibilities associated with having a job.??? Of course, the ultimate insult came when I read “I will interact positively with clients and staff when on duty and will maintain positive work ethics.??? The underlying message here being “even though you are an adult with prior work experience, we still feel it necessary to tell you how to act.??? Unfortunately, this type of condescension creates a social divide between employees and management that promotes itself far beyond the written word.

Verbal Communication
I swear, corporations have their own language. And for the most part, it’s like trying to understand Klingon. Corporate speak has become so bad that, get this, corporations have been formed to help other corporations reduce their mindless garb. It’s very common to walk into a meeting and here words like “value-added,” “action items,” and “extensible repository.” To illustrate my point, I’ll refer to a quote by Brian Fugere. Fugere is one of the partners of Deloitte Consulting, the company that released Bullfighter, a program aimed at analyzing corporate jargon. Fugere said that he’s had it with “repurposeable, value-added knowledge capital and robust, leverageable mind share.”

Are you starting to get the picture? Bullfighter can now be found at fightthebull.com, which is owned by Business Idiots, LLC. The company also has a book for sale titled, “Why business people speak like idiots.”

While companies try and tone down their idiot speak, they should also give a decent effort to sounding less like talking memos. What’s a talking memo? It’s someone who talks the way a memo would read. To me, this is just as (if not more) annoying than corporate jargon. People actually phrase their words as if they were writing an email or a piece of documentation. I’m all for being professional, but there’s no need to sound like C3P0 when having a conversation.

It’s clear that corporate America has a long way to go in order to be taken seriously in the world of intelligent communication. Between the talking memos, corporate jargon, internal communication follies and marketing information, it’s a wonder that sales are ever made.

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Part II: Social Class
Part two of this series will focus on social class in the workplace.