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Comment by jstx1 | Hacker News Reader

As a side note, I like how direct and casual these megacorp CEO emails are.

In my experience, if your executives are communicating in corporate PR speak internally, it means you’re surrounded by grifters and people who have failed upward.

Speaking directly and clearly is a core skill of successful executives. Corporate PR speak only interferes with conveying direct and clear internal messages. You aren’t worried about accidentally offending the people you work with, you’re more worried about not getting your point across as directly as possible.

Which is really bad when you do something that later becomes part of a lawsuit

Right, so direct speech is a loose indicator of how worried execs are of being sued, which reinforces the parent poster’s point.

> Corporate PR speak only interferes with conveying direct and clear internal messages.

I'd argue corporate PR speak directly and purposefully interferes with conveying any kind of message clearly. It often skirts the line between misleading and lying. And obviously you don't want to poison your own well with lies.

In academia too, when you pass a certain threshold of seniority, your emails become like this:

```

FROM: $ProfBigShot

TO: $PoorPhDStudent

Come visit me tomorrow at 2pm

Sent from my iPhone

```

Don't forget that the prof will almost certainly misspell the PhD student's name!

And may have the time and/or day wrong :S

Show up, prof is busy, says they meant the next day/hour/etc

this!

if they even write their name

once a professor misspelled my name 3 times in 1 email! I was impressed.

Why wouldn’t they be?

I guess it just feels different from the corporate speak we’d usually see

It’s a good point and an important distinction because we can be so easily fooled.

Corporate speak isn’t the speech of a human. It’s constructed PR.

It’s also a status/in-group marker in corporations.

CEOs can counter-signal power by not using it.

I'd expect there's some corporate-speak maximum that happens in middle management, and upper and lower people would use it less, with the curve being flatter for more bureaucratic companies.

Ah yes, the good old 3-way split of organizational hierarchy, and the posturing speech/behavior of the middle layer: https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...

So that's why I don't posture, I'm really a CEO!

Corporate-speak is usually centered around covering your ass with ambiguity.

CEOs dont feel compelled to do that on "private" emails but they sure as hell do it in public statements. They dial it up to 11 during layoffs or being interviewed about unethical behavior.

I think what you're picking up on is that people in leadership positions have to communicate to very different audiences.

As a first approximation, just think of the size of the destination audience:

- if it's a few people, the language will sound direct and casual

- if it's many thousands, millions (likely to include government, investors, customers) then it will sound formal, corporate, "PR"

Because we're more often likely to be in the 2nd category, we're used to hearing senior leaders sound like their words have been carefully edited.

But we shouldn't be surprised that when we get a glimpse of their comms in smaller settings, it sounds "just like us".

The cliche of "celebs--they're just like us" has some truth to it.

These guys probably answer dozens of emails per day

And spend the rest of the day golfing.

And they use stock symbols instead of company names like any other presumptuous user of this site.

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