‘Troxacitabine – that’s a word that I just can’t seem to say right,’ confesses Peter McBride, the vice president of communications and investor relations for Montreal-based BioChem Pharma. There’s an slight undertone of humor in his voice, as if he’s sharing a rather embarrassing confidence.
‘That’s a shame, because Troxaci – whatever – is one of our products in development,’ McBride says. ‘I still can’t pronounce all these terms. I really have to master them.’
All joking aside, McBride is quick to point out that his dilemma heading up the IR department of one of the hottest public biotech companies in North America after leaving old-economy Imasco, has become common in the profession. ‘Science and technology-based companies are where a lot of the market growth is happening,’ he says. ‘The bottom line is that you pretty much have to learn a new language to do an effective job of communicating for them.’
For John Lawler, an assistant professor of linguistics at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, and one of North America’s leading authorities on technical jargon, that new educational challenge was inevitable. ‘Geeks are news,’ he says. ‘As a society, we’re paying more attention to technology, and we’re buying into technology companies. What we’re seeing is a special in-group way of talking that has rarely made its way out of that group suddenly leaking into the outside world.’
Science fiction
Just how much jargon is necessary for IROs varies from one company to another. Montreal-based Stylus Strategic Communications represents some of Canada’s biggest high-tech players, including Nortel, Eicon Technology and Bell Nexxia. Talk around the office often veers toward OC-192 Sonet transport rings, dense wave division multiplexing and Diva Lan ISDN modems.
‘Makes you feel like you are part of a science fiction flick in the making,’ says Susan Herman, a firm partner and vice president of Stylus’ investor relations practice. ‘Internally, at Stylus the conversation can go something like this: How will you be handling the search engine? Answer: The content will be implemented in static DHTML supplemented by HTDig-enabled relevance-based searching.’
Indeed, there are times when the jargon gets so thick on the ground it loses its tenuous grip on meaning. ‘When I first heard one of our programmers was a master at Perl, I thought that he had taken up knitting,’ Herman says. ‘Then I found out that it’s an acronym that stands for practical extraction and reporting language.’
Jargons exist principally for two reasons, Lawler says. On one hand, they are a kind of verbal shorthand that scientists and technicians use to communicate quickly and precisely among themselves. Jargon can seem obscure to outsiders because it has a context-specific utility. Of course, Lawler says, it can also be used to exclude the hoi polloi.
‘You can dazzle people with jargon and leave them gasping for air,’ he says. ‘I would hesitate to say that was the dominant purpose of jargon, but it does happen. It depends on who you want to exclude and why.’
Saturated cats
Even adepts from related fields can find jargon daunting. Bill Rowe was no novice when he became director of investor relations at Synsorb Biotech in Calgary. He had already mastered the ins and outs of his old job at Nova Chemicals. However, even his years of experience in science-saturated industries weren’t quite enough. ‘My background is in organic chemistry from an industry perspective, so it’s not totally Greek,’ he says. ‘But it is a challenge. The challenge really is to try and help the science folks communicate the story to the outside world.’
Where jargon is concerned, that’s never easy. A specialized language all itself, jargon is often so context-sensitive and self-referential that it defies useful translation. ‘Dense wave division multiplexing’ only makes sense to someone who knows how dense and which waves, not to mention what multiplexing is.
‘It’s practically impossible to translate jargon,’ Lawler says. ‘It’s a self-defeating task. If you’re writing a document, or you’re communicating a technical concept, you don’t usually know what your audience already understands – you have to pick a starting point, and even that’s fraught with difficulties.’
Not that it’s a problem for Paul Carpino, director of investor relations at Celestica, a Toronto-based electronic components manufacturer that went public in March of this year. As far as he’s concerned, technological jargon has become so prevalent in our plugged-in, turned-on society that no translation is necessary.
Besides, Carpino says, the people who matter – the research analysts who track his company – have the jargon down pat. ‘They have to be that knowledgeable,’ he says. ‘They don’t even consider it jargon. It’s just nuts and bolts for them.’
Rare species
As for himself, Carpino says that he finds Celestica’s ‘I/O balls’ and ‘So-Dimms’ are perfectly intelligible. ‘I’ve grown up with technology,’ he says. ‘It’s a common language to me.’
While that may make Carpino a rare kind of IRO, Lawler says that understanding the jargon itself is not always as important, or as desirable, as understanding the metaphors behind it. All technical jargon is, to some extent, metaphor that can be deconstructed and reconstructed for each audience.
Ironically, then, the only way to master jargon is to forget that it exists. ‘The truth is that you don’t have to understand the jargon itself,’ Lawler says. ‘You have to be prepared to ask Why are they using these funny words? If you can understand that, then you can begin to translate the metaphor into another set of metaphors. What does a jargon term like interface mean but meeting face-to-face? Once you have that worked out, it becomes clear.’
Consequently, the key skill for high-tech IR professionals isn’t the ability to parse abstruse technical terms, but a genius for language and metaphor, and the ability to see the big picture. That’s a talent that ‘all the top IROs have;’ it’s what separates the best from the rest, says Joanne Brown, president and CEO of the Canadian Investor Relations Institute in Toronto. ‘The good IROs are able to become experts on their companies very quickly,’ she says. ‘Not necessarily experts on the technology – that’s not usually important – but experts on what their companies are trying to do with the technology.’
Knowing what a company is about is the real trick, according to Rowe. He hit the books hard when he took over Synsorb’s IR (he has since left the company), but though he says it gave him a starting point, he agrees with Lawler that trying to deal with the jargon on its own terms was a lost cause.
‘To be honest, you can’t learn how to talk the talk and walk the walk just by reading,’ Rowe says. ‘Synsorb’s CEO is a biochemist, but he has a gift for explaining things very clearly. He used an interesting technique with me: he told me to pitch to him, and that sure motivated me to go around the company and learn what it was all about very quickly.’
What he did, Rowe says, was gather together the threads of the company’s story. ‘There’s a challenge in that,’ he says. ‘But as professionals we have an obligation to put the time in and to understand. And once you understand what all these technologies do, then you can go on to tell the story.’
White-coat brigade
Indeed, McBride believes that knowing what he doesn’t know is even more important than being able to talk biotech with BioChem Pharma’s white-coat brigade. ‘I’m not ever going to be a scientist,’ he says. ‘My job is knowing what information is important and knowing who to ask. I know better than to shoot from the hip. Let’s face it, if I try to play the jargon game, I’m going to screw up. A big part of this job is knowing what your limits are.’
The key skills McBride looks for in his own staff aren’t so much technical or scientific knowledge and ability, but business savvy – along with communications and language skills, of course. Still, he says the job is a lot easier if they already have a background in science. ‘I’m not sure investors really need to know about the science, or that IROs have to talk like scientists,’ he says. ‘But there’s no question that a science degree in addition to the normal IR qualifications is a useful asset. That seems to be a good combination.’
Even without science degrees, Brown is seeing many IROs move from less-jargon rich industries to high technology and biotech. That, after all, is where the demand is today, and the cross-sector migrants seems to be managing rather well. ‘We’re beginning to see a lot more migration between sectors, because there’s a high demand for skills and experience,’ Brown says. ‘IR people take their toolkit and move between sectors. In high technology, they have to learn what the business is all about just like any other business.’
