A Consultant's Apology

I realize that most of my blog posts here on BG carry a judgmental or pejorative tone. For this, I feel like I owe all of you an apology, since I am only human, and am prone to the same grammatical gaffes as everyone else.

You see, while I may be a hard-hearted, pragmatic grammatical purist by night, by day, I am just another mild-mannered Professional Services consultant. In fact, on most days, I spend a lot of my time meeting with clients and talking out of my ass.
 

Sitting in Time-Out at 24,000 feet, thinking about what I did...



It is really quite easy to be critical of other people's communication challenges. Yet, we consultants (particularly those of the management consulting persuasion) often spend a great deal of time trying to say as much as possible while communicating nothing. Thus, I offer up a mea culpa to you, my grammatically gifted audience.

You may be wondering what would bring on such an outpouring of humility from your friendly neighborhood bitter grammarian. The answer is that I just spent an entire day in client meetings, and as a person who secretly hopes to elevate the art of written and verbal communication, I now feel the need for absolution. Although this post is intended to be spiritually agnostic, I ask you, my beloved readers, to hear my confession:

Today, I began a statement with "at the end of the day..."

I used the phrase "where the rubber meets the road" on at least four separate occasions.

I was too lazy or hurried to properly express my thoughts, and so I used made-up adjectives that simply don't exist in English, such as "flow chart-y."

I described PowerPoint slides using verbs in the passive voice. In fact, I even used several verbs in the passive-aggressive voice!

I used a condescending tone when needlessly spelling out words, such as referring to "the firewall for the capital I Internet," or saying that "we need to figure out the lower case R requirements for the capital R requirements."

I used air quotes. Many of them.

It was a long day, indeed.

I've heard people say that the first step in recovery is admitting that you have a problem. Since I'm only human (although some people with an aversion to consultants may argue that point), I know that I am not perfect. The fact that I can even see the error of my ways should bring me some peace and solace, yet I know that when Monday comes, I will once again have to don my black suit and face the perils of business English!

Writing at work can be more dangerous that you might think. The pen may be mightier than the sword, but it can be hard to feel mighty when I am armed only with a pen and eloquent prose, while my illiterate opponents are armed with bullets and sharp sentence fragments.

Oh well. I guess, at the end of the day, I'll just have to focus on my strategic imperatives, and leverage my core competencies to create some added value. ....where the rubber meets the road, of course!

Have a good weekend everyone!

-Lee