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I would be curious to know how many emails 37signals receives per week from people trying to sell directly to them using business mambo-jumbo like above.

Maybe it’s too much time in business school, but the only thing that I didn’t understand is “novel management practices”. Otherwise, yeah, it’s speaking in abstract generalities, but I guess some people eat that stuff up.

This reminds me of a job posting that a company I used to work for recently posted —a job that used to be part of “Marketing” was now part of the “Customer Acquisition and Retention Dept.” Glad to see that the new senior management is working hard on changes that’ll be critical to turning the business around!

I’d imagine they could do a rather interesting blog just by making fun of the inane incoming emails they get. I’d read it!

Note to self: never pitch 37 Signals by email….

Are “novel management practices” those used by Librarians and bookshop workers?

I wonder if there is an “optimal” sentence word length that could help sniff out bad writing. If you go by the assumption that smaller, elegant sentences carry more weight than oversaturated, wordy ones it’d be a neat experiment to try to pin down an algorithm for it. I’d love to have an Outlook plugin that catches me by saying “this sentence is 21 words long and uses 4 conjunctions!” or “did you really just say synergize?” =)

@Justin

I imagine if you searched for words like “competitive” or “strategic” in an email and found occurrences – you could automatically flag the message as spam and have very few false positives.

Translation:

“Big companies do things that you don’t. You should try doing what they do.

We’ll make you tons of cash if you do what we say. Trust us, we’re very smart.

By the way, English is our second language.”

Raza Imam http://BoycottSoftwareSweatshops.com

It’s actually kind of an interesting exercise to think how you would rewrite this sentence if you were trying to make meaning clear, rather than cloud it.

Without any of the (probably well deserved) snark that Raza put on his spin, I’d go with something like the following:

“[Redacted] helps large companies experiment with new management techniques and quantify the results.”

As a first pass, that seems pretty good, it takes away the verbed nouns and “two words where one will do” constructions that mark business nonsense. I see some problems still though. “Large companies” doesn’t make much sense if you know anything about 37signals, and I feel like “management techniques” wants to be condensed, but I’m not sure how (depends exactly what they mean by that, I suppose). I think the best I can get it down to without spending real time or having knowledge of what they do is the following.

“[Redacted] helps companies experiment with new management techniques and quantify the results.”

Anyone else want to take a crack? I’d be interested in seeing what people come up with.

Sad to say, but companies adore talking about themselves this way. It doesn’t impress clients, but they believe it does. And they are willing to pay writers handsomely to concoct such phrases.

It also helps hide the fact they aren’t doing anything remarkable. The above sentence translates, in real-world language, to:

“We help companies try all sorts of different things, and help them figure out which things (if any) actually work.”

Hard to win a fat ‘engagement-fee’ for that.

More fundamental problem: It’s rude and boring to begin an email talking about yourself and your company.

I have to wonder who actually came up with that sentence. Seeing e-mails like this always bothers me because they seem to forget that there’s an actual PERSON reading this e-mail – and anyone who took the time to learn anything about me personally would know that I don’t even think of responding to something that sounds like that.

This is one of my pet peeves in e-mail marketing (and all marketing for that matter) – this lack of research. I get three-times-monthly e-mails now from random salespeople asking me if they can “fill my IT needs,” and I’m a one-person shop. Have been for two years. Why do I need an IT person?