I don't have any trouble understanding people when they say something like "I'm in the sort of sustainability space around kind of bringing synergistic value-add to other people's work around this kind of space." They're simply saying nothing. I remember watching some cartoon where some aliens are watching humans converse and they interrupt by saying "ritual gum flapping time is over". That's all this is: ritual gum flapping. When two people flap their gums at each other for a few minutes, it increases their comfort with each other and that social comfort helps keep society glued together. Sometimes conversations are about exchanging ideas, other times they are purely about socialization. In this case, the conversations aren't about the ideas, they're about having a conversation.
It may seem pointless, but a lot of being human is pointless.
Making a presentation to others (the context of TFA) is not about socialization, it is about exchanging ideas. If you aren't communicating well there, you are failing at the primary objective.
I do agree there are contexts where the information transfer is not important (the ritual gum smacking). Good communicators can identify which is which and act appropriately.
Are you sure? I think business presentations are 99% getting your name out there and 1% teaching people valuable information. I've been to them and I'm not sure how anyone could pay attention to the content because it's very very slow-moving and boring. But now I know the presenter. Hence, it's obvious that this is a social ritual rather than something that makes objective good use of everyone's time. (The audience members attend so that other audience members will remember them too.)
(We recently had some company-wide meeting that was a few hours long. I realized that I could have read an essay version of the "presentation" in five minutes. 1 hour and 55 minutes times 300,000 employees makes presentations a pretty fucking dumb way of sharing information, if the only purpose is in fact to share information.)
Company wide meetings are so that nobody can claim they didn't get the memo. It's not just about sharing information, it's the implicit threat that everyone knows the information has been shared with you. Lots of other ways to solve that problem, but apparently herding everyone in the same room is the accepted default.
Nonsense. You can communicate anything at all complex faster, more clearly, and above all more reliably in print, even in an email, than by speech. Meetings and presentations are all about status and signaling.
Certainly there are better ways to build rapport than saying things like "I'm in the sort of sustainability space around kind of bringing synergistic value-add to other people's work around this kind of space" though, aren't there?
Human interaction already has plenty of social rituals that serve no purpose than to build rapport. Why pass ritual gum flapping off as practical speech?
It may seem pointless, but a lot of being human is pointless.