I now realise that I was wrong. Partially, at least. A while ago I wrote to Lucy Kellaway to complain about one of her pet complaints. She writes a pugnacious and witty column for the Financial Times, whose message, as she describes it, is the same every week: plug in your brain. One drum she likes to beat is the ‘deliver’ drum. ‘Deliver’, she insists, is ‘only acceptable when referring to something that can be transported in a van’. If companies can’t strap shareholder value onto a truck, they shouldn't claim that they can deliver it. I took umbrage with this argument—so much umbrage that actually I wrote an email to her. (It is, of course, essentail that journalists at the nation’s best daily newspaper hear about what I think.) I protested thus:
If you can deliver babies, sermons and punches, if you can deliver a criminal up to the authorities and be delivered from evil by God, why can't you deliver shareholder value? If you can coin both words and currencies, if you can unearth both cabbages and conspiracies, why can't you deliver both parcels and performance?
In other words, if we can already use deliver in a zillion ways, and if that’s true of zillions of other words too, then why complain about one particular usage?
As I said, though, I now realise that I was wrong.
It’s not that my argument doesn’t stand; it’s just that it’s irrelevant. The problem isn’t that deliver is being used in a new way. The problem is that the new way of using deliver is so general that almost no company should use it of themselves. To deliver—as used by companies who don’t actually deliver stuff in vans—is to supply or produce, to come up with the goods. These categories include virtually everything done by everyone in every walk of life. Farmers deliver (crops), Apple delivers (polished technology), and opium dens deliver (exotic experiences). These varied activities are homogenised by deliver, their distinctive spice suppressed by a bland commonality.
This generality partly explains why the word is so popular. It’s never the best word, but it’s always a convenient one. Deliver is like a Swiss army knife—you wouldn’t use it for building a shed or a house, but it’s handy in a pinch. David Cameron ‘delivered’ no fewer than eight times at PMQs last week, and no wonder, as it’s tricky to select the best verb when you’re pursued by Parliamentary bloodhounds. (Although he can overdo it. When asked how the EU renegotiations were going, he once responded, “I think I’ve got a track record of delivery in Europe that can help to deliver these changes.”)
But if a company isn’t about to be eaten alive by a Right Honourable, and if it wants to say what it does in particular (as opposed to what every company does in general), then it should take the time to pick more specific and more interesting verbs. Apple innovates, farmers cultivate and harvest, opium dens intoxicate, and, yes, delivery men deliver things in vans.
The same is true of two other ubiquitous words, value and solution. They’re too ordinary, too insubstantial. Most businesses create value, unless they’re straightforwardly wasteful. And most businesses provide solutions, since providing a solution just means helping someone do something new or better. Streetlights are an illumination solution. Lord of the Rings creates value as a fantasy narrative enjoyment solution. And if we want all three in one windy phrase: the London Underground creates value by delivering capital city transport solutions.
These are boring words. They’re vacuous universals, so true of everyone that they belong to no one. Avoid them.
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