The phone is burning a hole in my lap. The screen’s glare, hidden beneath the lip of the mahogany conference table, feels accusatory. My thumb swipes frantically, jumping between a search engine and a notes app, trying to decode the alien dialect being spoken 24 inches above my head. Someone, a VP with a voice like polished gravel, just said we need to “socialize the deck before we double-click on the key learnings.” A wave of quiet panic, the kind you get when you’re stuck between floors in a metal box and the air starts to feel recycled, washes over me. I’m nodding, of course. Making eye contact. Projecting ‘synergy’ or whatever the hell I’m supposed to be projecting.

But inside, I’m just a kid who’s been called on in class and hasn’t done the reading. The language being used is designed, I suspect, not to communicate but to sort. It’s a bouncer at the door of understanding. If you know the secret handshake-if you know that ‘boiling the ocean’ means attempting an impossible task and ‘piggybacking the paradigm’ is… well, I’m still working on that one-you’re in. If not, you’re left outside, feeling inadequate and Googling under the table.

The Costume of Complexity

I’ll confess something. For years, I was part of the problem. I thought it was a professional rite of passage. You learn the jargon, you start to use it, and suddenly you sound like you belong. It’s a costume. You say “let’s take this offline” instead of “let’s talk about this later because we’re wasting everyone’s time.” You talk about “leveraging core competencies” instead of “using the skills we already have.” It felt efficient. It felt, I’m ashamed to admit, smart. I criticized the practice in private, then did it anyway in the next meeting. It was a neat little contradiction I lived with for about 4 years.

August G.H. and the Scent of Precision

It makes me think of a man I once read about, August G.H. His job title was Senior Fragrance Evaluator. His entire profession was the sworn enemy of vague abstraction. When August smelled a new perfume, he couldn’t write “This scent will leverage our brand’s core aromatic values to achieve market penetration.” No. He had to be precise. He had to write things like, “A fleeting top note of Sicilian mandarin gives way to a heart of Damascus rose, undercut by an unexpected, almost metallic hint of geranium leaf, with a base that lingers with Haitian vetiver and a touch of synthetic ambergris.” His job depended on a shared, specific, sensory reality. Corporate culture, it seems, often depends on the exact opposite: a shared, vague, intellectual fog.

We’ve built a professional world where sounding intelligent is prized more than being understood. The language is a moat, and the bigger the words, the wider the moat, the more important the castle and its inhabitants must seem. It’s a linguistic arms race where the only casualty is meaning.

To speak plainly is to risk being wrong. If you say, “I think we should increase the marketing budget by 14% to target a new demographic of urban gardeners aged 24-34,” you have presented a clear, falsifiable idea. People can debate it. They can poke holes in it. They can improve it. If you say, “We need to ideate a more impactful go-to-market strategy to empower our growth vectors,” what have you actually said? Nothing. You’ve said absolutely nothing of substance, and no one can prove you wrong because you never made a point in the first place. It’s a suit of armor made of air.

This obsession with obfuscation bleeds into everything. We demand reports on “logistical chain inefficiencies” when what we really mean is “Where are the 44 missing pallets of product?” We hold meetings to “realign on strategic imperatives” instead of just asking, “What are we actually trying to sell, and to whom?” We don’t need another brainstorming session to blue-sky the paradigm shift; sometimes you just need a clear line of sight. You need something as direct and unambiguous as a poe camera feed showing you exactly what happened on the loading dock at 4:24 AM. The truth is often simple, brutal, and visible, if you’re willing to look at it without a filter of jargon.

The Real Cost: Erosion of Trust

The real cost of this is much higher than the occasional failed project. It’s the slow, methodical erosion of trust and innovation. How many brilliant ideas, born in the minds of junior employees, have died on their tongues because they didn’t know how to phrase them in the approved corporate dialect? How many problems fester for months or years because nobody feels comfortable enough to say, simply, “I don’t understand what that means,” or “That sounds like nonsense to me”? The new hire, frantically searching for definitions under the table, is not the one failing the company. The company is failing them, by creating an environment where a secret language is more important than a shared mission.

I made a mistake for years, thinking complexity was a sign of intelligence. I believed, as many do, that the more arcane the language, the more profound the thought behind it. But that’s a lie. It’s a shield. The smartest people I’ve ever met, the true experts in their fields, have an almost magical ability to make the complex simple. They can distill an intricate idea down to its bones, not because they are dumbing it down, but because they understand it so completely that they don’t need the fog to hide behind. They can stand in the clear light of simple words because their ideas are strong enough to survive the exposure.

The Standard of True Intelligence

That’s the standard. Not a PowerPoint deck loaded with buzzwords that leaves everyone impressed but confused. It’s the 14-word email that makes an entire team go, “Ah, now I get it.” It’s admitting you were stuck, that the words didn’t make sense, that the air was getting thin. It’s choosing to open the door and speak a language everyone can breathe.

CLARITY