Have you been down to your local blacksmith’s lately? Unless you’re reading this post through a hole in the space-time continuum, you probably haven’t. Actually, blacksmiths still exist, but they are now a rare, highly-specialized group of skilled workers.
Compare this to the 15th through 19th centuries, when a blacksmith was one of the focal points of every community. As our societies and technologies evolved, the skills of the blacksmith became less and less pervasive.
Now compare this to the wordsmith. I couldn’t find any significant history on the wordsmith, so I’ll make something up, and then go post it on Wikipedia. The wordsmith was also around in the 15th through 19th centuries, although they kept a low profile. This is because as children, future wordsmiths were routinely beat up by future blacksmiths
This may explain why so many wordsmiths are able to rear their ugly heads (and ply their treacherous trade) today. With the diminishing number of future blacksmiths, future wordsmiths don’t receive near as many beatings as they should to discourage them.
You probably know a wordsmith – although they set-up shoppe in the most unlikely places. The wordsmith is the one who ensures that any meeting that could have been done in 30 minutes, goes for at least two-hours. These are the people who will argue incessantly about subject-verb inversion, and how it may affect the organization’s vision statement.
If you find yourself organizing or facilitating the articulation of organizational goals, strategies, mission or vision statements, you need to root out the wordsmiths early. Send them on a business trip, or tell them there’s a newspaper somewhere that needs to have a letter written to the editor because the sentence structure of a headline was inappropriate.
The bottom line is that missions, visions, goals and strategies are all useless documents, unless they move people to action of some sort. If the wordsmith gets her way, these documents will all be grammatically and politically correct, but so general and generic to the point of being useless.
So… if you have any of these documents, that sit high on a shelf for 11 months of the year, until the dust is blown off them for the next planning cycle, you can blame the wordsmith. To address this problem, you have two options:
- Distract the wordsmith long enough to rewrite the documents in a concise and meaningful way.
- Hire a blacksmith to take out the wordsmith.