The Weltchek Weekly

A well-known healthcare company recently hired a diversity and inclusion officer who announced in a press release that he was going to magnetize and incubate diverse talent to fuel innovation at the company.

Who actually says I’m going to magnetize talent?

Would a grown person really want to be incubated?

This is a good example of how business people take perfectly legitimate thoughts and—in an effort to make those thoughts sound even more important—render them unintelligible (or funny) by ratcheting up the complexity of their word choices. Magnetize sounds bigger than attract! Incubate talent is buzzier than nurture or develop talent!

But it’s always best to communicate with words and terms people actually use—and in ways they use them—so I would leave incubate for premature babies and, if you’re a venture capitalist, for start-up companies.

As for magnetize, I would toss it in the trash and hope its magnetic properties keep it there.