Do you Yogababble?

Yogababble is “spiritual-sounding language used by companies to disguise or compensate for practical or financial weaknesses in a business or product.”

According to NYU Professor Scott Galloway, who coined the term, the amount of yogababble in a company’s materials has an inverse correlation with its stock return post-IPO. I admit there’s some level of subjectivity in the metric, and I’m sure many notable exceptions to the rule that I won’t bother looking for.

I understand the temptation to resort to yogababble. First of all, “people don’t buy what you do; they buy why you do it.” Second, everyone else is yogababbling about their business all the time and you’re no less a visionary. Last but not least, you don’t have an actual business model and the figures suck!

Being an irrepressible visionary myself, I feel you. But a big vision needs people to help materialize it, and it pays to talk to them in ways their simple minds can understand.

Image by Mikhail Nilov