Inspirational quotations at work are nothing to shout about

FT.com


By Rhymer Rigby
©AP

Inspirational quotes seem to be everywhere in the workplace. People paste them at the end of emails, they use them in PowerPoint presentations, they download motivational quote screensavers, they have a quote of the day emailed to their in boxes and they follow Twitter feeds made up of quotes.

Well-known examples include Henry Ford’s: “Failure is simply the opportunity to begin again.” Another favourite is BC Forbes’s: “If you don’t drive your business you’ll be driven out of business.”

Recycling quips such as these may be intended to inspire or to lend gravity and credibility, but do they really serve a purpose?

Often, they merely amount to opaque ways of saying rather obvious things. For instance, Bill Gates’s – “Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning” – is just another way of saying you learn from mistakes.

Coco Chanel’s – “Success is often achieved by those who don’t know that failure is inevitable” – basically means you have to have confidence that you will succeed.

According to Nataly Kogan, CEO of Happier, a social networking site for sharing happy moments, businesspeople are as celebrity-fixated as everyone else and often choose quotes based on the author rather than the content. “You see quotes from business celebrities where the quote is of no interest without the person’s name,” she says.

An oft-quoted example of this is the following from Steve Jobs: “We don’t get a chance to do that many things, and every one should be really excellent.”

Neil Mullarkey, a former comedian who offers leadership training using improvisational theatre, agrees that this is one of the biggest problems with inspirational quotes in business. “You should use a quote because it says something, not because it came out of Steve Jobs mouth,” he says. “You want to look for quotes which are new, surprising or counter-intuitive. It’s often a lot more impressive to quote Oscar Wilde or even Eminem than it is to use something that Richard Branson said.”

Mr Branson gave us the pithy if slightly vacuous line: “Screw it, let’s do it.”

By contrast, Winston Churchill was a fountain of good examples – from his “Finest Hour” speech to “Blood, sweat and tears”.

According to Ms Kogan, quotes need context. “Don’t randomly put them in communications.” The sprinkling of quotes like seasoning, she says, demeans both the quote and the message. “I have a couple of quotes in my investor pitch document. But they make sense in that context.”

Richard Sunderland, CEO of the branding consultancy Heavenly, adds that it should be about “trying to boil down ideas to their simplest form”.

Of course, the use of quotations in business documents is just a modern manifestation of a long tradition. “The practice of quoting authorities, poets, songs, proverbs, et cetera, is a traditional one,” says Mark Liberman, professor of linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania.

Earlier models include the mottoes on coins and coats of arms, quotations on gates and epigraphs in books. Prof Liberman says quotes often perform a kind of decorative function and that you should ask yourself, “Does [it] gild the lily . . .  or does it help make a point?”

Another trap that those who garland their communications with quotes should beware of is that no matter how snappy the aphorism, quotes lose their power very quickly.

“Once you’ve heard a quote three times, it becomes hackneyed and starts to annoy you,” warns Mr Mullarkey.

Therefore, you should look beyond the obvious. If you pick one of the best- known things that Jeff Bezos has ever said to add zip to your presentation, your audience will probably have heard it dozens of times before – and the effect may be the opposite. For this reason, you should avoid, above all, the temptation to put an inspirational quote in your email signature. Regular correspondents will see it repeatedly and to the point of aggravation.

As Mr Mullarkey says: “Quotes at the end of emails can appear affected, pretentious and a bit smug.” Which is surely worth quoting.