When working on culture engagements for large companies, you soon notice a lot of nice-sounding words being thrown around like confetti.
It’s an occupational hazard:
Quality! Passion! Excellence! Integrity! Teamwork!
And yes, “Accountability” is high on the list…
Like anything else, it’s only meaningful if you actually mean it first.
Which is why language matters. Which is also why, I think, art can be such a powerful way to directly change the language inside organizations. Which is why gapingvoid built an entire business around it.
And if you still need to ask the question, “Why does language matter?”, you need to read George Orwell’s amazingly superb essay, “Politics and The English Language” and then apply what he says about politics, to the world of business.
And if you do this, I mean REALLY do this, you can expect to see your quarterly results (or whatever metric you value highly) to improve considerably.
Language matters.
