When Corporate Polish Had Erased the Person Behind It

Every public statement this executive made existed inside a larger corporate environment. Communications teams. Legal considerations. Internal stakeholders. Customers. Investors.

An early draft of one statement, as she recalls writing it, read: "We're asking people to pursue too many priorities at once."

By the final review round, it had become: "We remain committed to driving transformational outcomes across the organisation."

Nothing in the second version is false. Nothing in it says anything either.

The Problem

Comms asked for softer wording. Legal preferred nothing that read as critical of process. Colleagues noticed before she fully did. As she remembers being told: "You were much clearer in the meeting than in the announcement."

The Diagnosis

Not: "This sounds professional."

But: "I can tell how this person thinks."

Off the record, by her own account, the same executive would say: "Most strategy problems are really prioritization problems. We're not short of ideas. We're short of focus."

The second statement contains judgement. The first contains vocabulary.

The moment that mattered, she says, wasn't a meeting. It was reading a published statement back and thinking, plainly: this is accurate, but it doesn't sound like me.

The Work

The work went backwards from how she actually reasoned with no communications team in the room.

What Changed

A strong executive voice isn't a set of stylistic tricks. It's recognisable judgement, expressed consistently, in public.

If your public voice sounds more corporate than you actually are: