By Rolf Crocker

I cannot believe it – I haven’t paid full-boat for a book in, like, forever!  Especially for a somewhat diminutive book with a price somewhere north of $20.  What drew me to the book was the purple sticker in the upper left-hand corner that said ‘Autographed Copy’.  That didn’t impress me, since I had not previously heard of ANY of the three authors listed.  But the title piqued my interest.  Soon I was reading the dust-jacket, which was intriguing.  Next was the dedication – that was freaking hilarious!.  Then I read the first few pages of the book and immediately marched to the Cashier where I shelled out the requisite $22.00 plus tax (8.75% where I reside in California), sat outside and began to immediately dig into it.  What on earth prompted me to violate all of the book-buying rules that I hold holy and sacrosanct and buy this Lilliputian tome on the spot?

Thanks for asking – I appreciate your candid and spontaneous response…

A Bullfighter’s Guide – Why business people speak like idiots by Brian Fugere, Chelsea Hardaway & Jon Warshowsky (©2005 Free Press, div of Simon & Schuster, Inc.)  This fine trio of ‘unknowns’ (at least to me – as if I’m the Validation of who is ‘known’ or not…) all work (or have worked) for Deloitte Consulting.  The dedication is “…to Lawrence Tureaud (better known as Mr. T).  He said it best: ‘Don’t gimme none o’ that jibba-jabba!’”  The Premise?  The language of business today is BS.  From Annual Reports and corporate e-mails to sales literature and PowerPoint presentations, we’re so inundated with bovine excrement that we don’t even pay attention anymore.  We clamor to be heard, yet because of factors such as political correctness, fear of liability and even technology, we live in a dull, homogenized, copy and paste, ‘use the Wizard’ world.

Using real-world examples, this Trio breaks down the Bull into four areas, or ‘Traps’ – The Obscurity Trap (jargon, wordiness, evasive language); The Anonymity Trap (clones, political correctness, ‘company standards’); The Hard-Sell Trap (infomercials, meeting quotas, ‘…if you call in the next 20 minutes…’); and The Tedium Trap (boredom, S² - D² [same stuff, different day], non-entertaining).  Within each section are numerous suggestions on A) what doesn’t work and B) what does and can work.  Even a little imagination can catapult you far beyond your contemporaries and counterparts!  At the end, there is the hilarious, yet helpful ‘Bull Spotter’s Guide’ containing 86 too-oft-used words and phrases, such as Close The Loop, Incentivise, Paradigm Shift, and my personal ‘I-hate-that-term’ term, ‘Outside the Box’.

If you’re tired of floating, “up a tributary of excrement without an adequate means of propulsion”, you must buy this book.  Just do as I say and not as I did – get it online and save yourself a few sheckles!    5++ Stars!