A recent message on LinkedIn from a new connection had me laughing. I’m barely active on LinkedIn, as I consider myself retired from most of that, but it serves to amuse me more than educate me.

The message:

Thank you for connecting with me earlier. I reached out because I’m a big believer in using Linkein to create win win strategic partnerships with highly motivated individuals and businesses from around the world. If interested, I would like to briefly speak with you so you may tell me about yourself and business and discuss if we might potentially have any synergy together. Thanks in advance for both your time and consideration. Best Regards, ….

I cringed. A boilerplate. It could have been written by the Corporate B.S. Generator.

And I sighed. There were times I had to write like that, in that soulless speak of buzzwords – but it was never to be understood, it was so that it was parsed by Human Resource departments, or Upper Management. This sort of writing is only appealing to the people who either make the Koolaid or drink it. Here. I’ll take a stab at a better way of writing the above with some pointers in blockquotes.

Thanks for adding me [use of personal pronoun attempting to establish a human connection]. I try to connect to people and businesses I might do things with – having looked over your profile [which apparently was not done] I saw you have experience with [add what you found interesting] and thought I’d drop you a note. Maybe we could chat about it sometime?

See, somewhere along the path of writing for business, people lose what they really need for actual communication. The first is not to make the reader cringe. The second is to write toward an objective – what do you actually want to talk about other than overused buzzwords? I mean, I could write like that:

I can schedule a synergistic meeting such that we can holisticly evolve out-of-the-box solutions that leverage competently iterated open-source results. We can appropriately benchmark high-payoff outsourcing through synergistically facilitating scalable relationships in a many-to-many matrix. I look forward to working with you to progressively formulate sustainable ROI.

Regards,
Corporate Drone.

Or, I could just write, “Clearly, we can communicate here” which translates to:

“I communicate when I desire.

I take great joy in watching you squirm as you actually have to write something of worth to continue attempting to communicate with me.

Please, make yourself relevant or bugger off.”