The Language of Business

Part 1 - How to Speak Fluently Across the Executive Table

Aug 07, 2025

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The Language of Business: How to Speak Fluently Across the Executive Table

Over the past year writing Cook’s PlayBooks, I’ve realized something interesting. More than 30% of what I’ve published, and over 40% of my 1:1 client sessions, centers around an important theme; communicating for influence and impact.

Whether we’re diagnosing operational risk, designing better forecasts, or aligning org structures to our strategic plans, the final key to unlock influence always comes down to communications:

Can you connect and influence the room?

The room might be just one person (your CEO), or a few people (the Board), or your entire staff/team. Here’s an interesting irony - the higher the level you achieve as a leader, the less and less your influence and impact depends on what you know or how to do “the thing”, and the more and more it becomes dependent on your leadership and on translating your knowledge effectively and communicating the “Why?”.

Great communication starts and ends with language. That’s obvious, but it’s worth writing down. The words you use and how you phrase (assemble) your word choices make the difference between an “Aha Moment” and “Huh?”

Great communication results in people connecting with your ideas, respecting your knowledge, and leaning in with you to create impact. Bad communication? Well, unfortunately, the opposite of all that.

Another critical communication idea I’ve learned the hard way over the years is:

Communicating is about “them”. It’s not about “you”.

Specifically, this means getting out of your own head and using common language the audience might connect with at their level and at their pace of information absorption.

Great communication uses language your audience will remember, repeat and storytell to somebody else.

Bottom Line: The right language builds connection; connection builds credibility; repeatable language builds alignment; alignment builds impact.

Connection > Credibility > Alignment > Impact

This week’s post is Part 1 of a 2 part series dedicated to the strategic power of words and the essential vocabulary and metaphors every executive might want to add to their own language arsenal.

At every startup and scaling company I’ve helped lead, there’s been a silent, and sometimes not-so-silent, translation problem inside the executive team. It looks like this:

Engineering speaks in sprints, commits, bugs, code, and releases
Product talks about roadmaps, user feedback loops, user interface and experience
Sales talks in quarters, quotas, reps, pipeline, commissions
Marketing weighs in on campaigns, funnels, attribution, MQLs
Finance? We’re busy modeling runways, variances, unit economics, allocations, and EBITDA

While they’re all part of each tribe’s language, most of the time the tribes are all talking past each other.

If you're a CEO, COO or CFO, you're the rare executive expected to understand everyone’s language. Understanding is not enough. As a C-Level exec, you need to be able to be the “Chief Translator”.

One of your key roles is actually translating the more complex, specific, or nuanced language into much simpler and common Language of Business for everyone to share.

The Universal Language of Business

These are the most common nouns and verbs of business:

Revenue
Gross Margin
Operating Margin
Operating Income
Cash Flow

In addition, we have other metrics (adjectives? and adverbs?) which support the top level language:

Unit Economics (“profitability” or “margin” per unit sold)
CAC / LTV (customer acquisition cost / lifetime value)
ROI - Return on Investment

These aren’t just finance terms. They're how every executive decision eventually gets measured.

Here’s the thing: The best CFOs don't just communicate and report these core elements of business language - they teach their peers and teams how the company’s decisions map to this language.

CFOs help Sales see how discounts erode gross margin.
CFOs help Product see how delay in feature delivery pushes out the payback for customer acquisition costs (CAC).
CFOs help Engineering understand how headcount allocation affects runway.
CFOs help Marketing tie campaign spend to customer cohorts and lifetime value (LTV).

As CFO, I’ll argue you are not only the Chief Translating Officer but also the Chief Data Influence Officer. You sit at the unique intersection of all the company’s activities translated into dollars and you need to decipher and reverse engineer the dollars back to the data to create new insights and new recommended activities.

So next time don’t just report LTV/CAC. Instead, help Product see how user onboarding affects churn. Help Customer Success link NPS to upsells. Show Marketing how multiple campaigns become a tax on team capacity, prioritization, and potentially customer confusion.

From Chief Translator to Chief Influencer

I've written before about being the Chief Architect of the business. That means aligning Strategy, Structure, and Execution. Language is going to be a key tool required for that alignment.

When teams operate in silos, they develop tribal dialects. Useful within the tribe. But alienating outside of it. Cross-functional friction follows. Priorities diverge. Metrics conflict. It becomes impossible to row in the same direction.

In my very first post, I talked about coming from generations of doctors. We’ve all experienced the very bad habit of doctors hiding behind their own latin based language that nobody can understand. Worse, they use lots of acronyms (e.g. “b.i.d”, “LBP” - is that lower back pain? or low blood pressure?)

So please don’t be a doctor. Become a multi-language CFOs and talk in simple and plain language to your ~~patients~~ internal customers.

Take the time to not only learn other people’s and other department’s language, but use that language to bridge back to the common business language you are trying to influence.

Maybe that’s product release velocity or go-to-market design or customer success health scores. The more you learn their language, the more credibility you earn to teach yours.

Plain and Simple Talk: The CFO Language Trap

Too many CFOs hide behind spreadsheets and financial jargon. It’s tempting. It’s comfortable. It feels rigorous and complete. And it is. But your audience hates that. We present with way too much detail and too much complexity. “Plain and Simple” is not core to our DNA… but it needs to be.

Humans get lost in details and complexity. If nobody in the room is willing to do the work to understand you, or worse stays silent and nod politely, you’ve missed your mark. Worse, you’ve failed in your potential to engage with that audience and put another brick on the relationship foundation.

So stop it. Your job is to simplify the complex, to model the myriad of variables into a plain and simple explanation and recommended next action(s).

Cook’s PlayBooks Tip: 3 insights maximum per presentation. Not 4… not 6… maybe only 1!

Name It! Create the Headline

Using complex language or too much language becomes a cost of connecting. A tax on speed. A drag on getting deep and engaging with your audience. So, simplify your language and the best way to simplify your language is to “Create a Headline”. For fans of my Islands of Safety post, you’ll recall that each Island should carry a “Headline” or a “Name”. This is the same concept I’m talking about here.

When you nail the headline, you create memory. Memory creates connection. Connection creates engagement and deeper relationships.

All of a sudden you are now in “the flow” of the conversation, where “the room” is understanding better, making decisions faster, and even anticipating second-order effects. The “room” is now operating better because you simplified your language and “named it” with a headline.

Before you know it, “the Finance person” is no longer playing the reporting or validating role, you are now an integral part of the room’s decision making processes. You’ve taken a small step in communication but made a giant leap for “Finance Kind”!

Cook’s PlayBooks Tip: Before any key meeting, invest the time to prepare for the 3 or less “Islands” or “Headlines” derived from the Key Insights you want to deliver to the room. Warning. Coming up with great headlines or “insight names” is harder than it sounds. Be prepared to throw away your first 2-3 attempts, just like any great poet or songwriter crumples up their first drafts. This may take 20-30 minutes of “prep time” but that’s a great investment in connecting and influencing the room.

My Personal Netflix Envelope Lesson

Back in the early days of Netflix, I found myself knee-deep in logistics, learning dozens of USPS codes, paper weight standards, business reply mail postage rates, airline schedules for our famous red envelopes. We were shipping hundreds of thousands of DVDs monthly.

I spent an average of 2-3 hrs per day for at least 3 months embedded at the largest GMF (General Mail Facility) located in San Jose learning all aspects of these operational logistics. I was learning a whole new operational language.

I knew if I couldn’t model the “time and motion” of these envelope logistics, then I had very little hope of translating my new language into our financial unit economics and to other internal operations teams.

I needed to speak “USPS Ops” fluently to Engineering, Marketing, and Customer Service for our launch (and company) to be a success.

Here’s an excerpt that punctuates the importance of operations in our earliest days at Netflix. This passage is from “That’ll Never Work” - the book Marc Randolph (our founding CEO) wrote to finally tell the story on how the 6 of us (our founding team) started Netflix in 1997 and launched to the world in early 1998.

I’ve taken the same “USPS Ops” translator mindset into every company since Netflix.

Bottom Line: I believe language is your operating system for leadership influence and impact.

The Science Behind Headlines and Metaphors

Cognitive science and behavioral psychology consistently show that the framing of information dramatically affects how it's received. The right language doesn’t just clarify the concept, it primes the human brain for taking action, builds credibility, and shapes emotion.

Studies in neuroscience reveal that metaphor-rich language activates more brain regions than abstract data alone. Metaphors engage memory, emotion, and action simultaneously.

As a leader, using structured, metaphorical language not only simplifies complexity, it creates neural pathways for repeatable influence. Over time, that influence becomes institutional knowledge.

Change your language, and you don’t just change the meeting, you begin changing the culture.

Over the years, I’ve developed a personal toolkit of financial headlines and metaphors to help others understand tradeoffs.

Here are a few I use constantly:

“What’s the tax on that decision?”
When someone proposes a new initiative, I’ll ask: What’s the switching cost? What other systems does this new system break? Are we adding org complexity? Every big internal project usually carries hidden friction… a hidden operating tax. Great operators call this “tax” out, measure it, and try to reduce it.
“Are we deferring costs or just hiding them?”
A scrappy and “innovative” solution today many times defers tech debt as the innovative solution absolutely doesn’t scale. As this tech debt accrues, many times we are blind to the pain we are storing up for later.
“Are we building trust or burning it?”
How we handle a tough call or an internal or external crisis can either build trust equity or burn it. Trust is one of those intangible assets on your company’s hidden balance sheet.
“What’s the fully loaded cost of that hire?”
It’s not just salary. It’s management bandwidth, onboarding time, travel time, “high maintenance” or “autonomous”? Bad cultural fits can be a huge hidden cost to the culture.
“Are we accruing risk?”
Just like an unpaid vendor, some decisions build exposure over time. Ignored performance issues. Postponed architecture decisions. These are the equivalents of a ballooning liability on your leadership balance sheet.

Cook’s PlayBooks Tip: Practice changing up your language by using headlines or metaphors that people might remember. Your goal is to get your audience’s attention before you can deliver your knowledgable influence.

I say “practice” on purpose. This will feel very uncomfortable at first especially when “the room” doesn’t expect it to come from the “finance person”. But practice makes the next time, and the next time, and the next time, easier and easier. Pretty soon you will be connecting better with “the room”.

Here are 20 Financial Headlines or Metaphors:

While all of these below are relatively standard concepts, the slight shift in meaning to an operational problem may help the “room” listen up and pay attention with your crisp word choices. Some are statements and some are powerful questions.

1. “What’s the tax on this decision?”

Translation: What’s the hidden cost of time, distraction, coordination complexity that reduces the net benefit of this choice?
Use it when: Evaluating tools, new processes, or org changes.

Example:

Early in my Mozilla days, the product team wanted to roll out a new A/B testing platform. Sounded great. More velocity, more learning, more precision.

But nobody, including me, calculated the tax.

The engineering integration effort stole Firefox roadmap cycles. QA time doubled. Ops had to rebuild environments. And our experimentation velocity actually slowed.

Lesson?
Every decision has a hidden cost. It might not hit your P&L, but it hits your bandwidth. Your people. Your momentum.

As CFOs, we need to price the tax not just the investment.

What’s the decision tax you’re not naming right now?

2. “Are we deferring costs or hiding them?”

Translation: Are we pushing pain into the future under the illusion of short-term savings or short-term GSD (get shit done). The problem being when “shit compounds”!
Use it when: Assessing scrappy MVPs, hiring delays, or temporary patches.

Example: The CEO, the Board, and many in the engineering team were ecstatic about one of our star engineer’s experiment he just demoed. It was called “Boot to Gecko”. It was showing how we could put Firefox (based on Gecko Dev. Engine) on a small bootable device (a smartphone). The ask was we only needed $25M and about 12 months of effort to prove out the potential. If it worked, it was huge. It sure looked like it worked - we just saw it demoed!

The problem? The Boot to Gecko demo was custom code running off 1 server underneath the star engineer’s desk. The code used for that small demo worked, but there was no way it could scale to the scale we needed for millions of users with corresponding cloud calls… not desktop server “calls”.

Over the course of the next 12 months, the initial entire demo which excited us to greenlight $25M had to be rewritten from scratch with a team of over 75 engineers and even more backend datacenter infrastructure, supporting hardware and other unforeseen costs. The total bill after the 1st 12 months was over $50M… the classic 2x the original estimate. We had experienced the “hidden cost”. The deferred and compounding cost was yet to come over the next 2+ years… the final bill was low digit 9 figures by the time we finally launched what became known as “Firefox OS”.

3. “Are we burning trust here?”

Translation: Slowly eroding goodwill or confidence through inconsistency, delays, or internal churn.
Use it when: Flagging team burnout, missed promises, or brand damage.

Example: The early Netflix streaming days circa 2010 had the company slowing down streaming to all customers when there were too many people trying to stream at the same time. This issue became known to the passionate early Netflix streaming community as “throttling”.

The problem was the company wasn’t honest with its customers that it was doing this on purpose. They just figured it was a smart operational “fix” to their scaling problems. The company burned a lot of trust early on with this decision.

P.S. But probably the most famous “burning of trust” was the 2011 Qwikster debacle where the company literally announced with no notice they were splitting Netflix into 2 companies; “Netflix” would remain for the new streaming business and the entire DVD by mail customers built over the prior 14 years and nearly 95% of the current customer base would now be known and branded as “Qwikster”.

To add insult to the loss of trust, Netflix also implemented a 60% price increase at the same time as the name changes with no real explanation to their customers. Netflix burned so much trust (and churned 800,000 customers) in such a debacle… it literally became an SNL skit.

Here’s the apology they filmed a few months after the change and after all the damage was done. Decide for yourself how important communication and the use of language is!

Here’s the hilarious SNL skit:

Another month or so later, Netflix completely reset the whole decision, rolled back the price increases and simply said the equivalent of “Do Over!”

Suffice it to say language and communication is critically important!

4. “This is accruing risk.”

Translation: We’ve made an operational choice that’s compounding exposure over time, even if it hasn’t triggered a failure yet.
Use it when: Reviewing product debt, legal exposure, one-sided deals, or operational shortcuts that don’t scale.

5. “Fully loaded cost” or “Total cost of ownership”

Translation: The true cost of a decision includes more than just the dollars. Time is also money. Alternative opportunities and roads not taken. Long term team morale and burn out (especially in engineering) is a real risk and accrues real long term costs.
Use it when: Budgeting for hires, tools, or vendor relationships.

6. “Let’s not compound the problem.”

Translation: Stop normalizing broken processes or people issues by building around them.
Use it when: You see a workaround becoming the default workflow.

7. “We’re burning cash.”

7a. “We’re burning time.”

7b. “We’re burning optionality.”

Translation: Some decisions don’t just cost money. Some decisions cut off future paths.
Use it when: Pushing back on overcommitments, large bets, or exclusive dependencies.

8. “That’s an off balance sheet risk.”

Translation: A liability or risk that isn’t showing up in the metrics or financials, but is still very real.
Use it when: Raising cultural issues, fragile systems, or unacknowledged 2nd order downstream costs.

9. “This is a high-churn activity.”

Translation: We’re investing in something that produces a lot of rework or repetition with little long-term yield.
Use it when: Reviewing time sinks, customer support escalations, or ineffective marketing.

10. “We’re compounding operating leverage.”

Translation: Our fixed costs are creating exponential upside (or downside) based on how we execute.
Use it when: Scaling revenue teams or fixed infrastructure.

11. “Not all revenue is equal.”

Translation: Don’t get seduced by top-line growth if the business fundamentals don’t support it. Margins are more important than Revenue. Is this a 1-time or hopefully recurring purchase? Is this revenue customized to just this customer or can we use what we build here and sell it repeatedly to other customers?
Use it when: Bringing GTM leaders or founders back to focus on revenue that scales.

12. “We’re treating symptoms, not curing root causes.”

Translation: We’re spending to mask issues instead of investing in the real fix. Example - our NRR by subsidizing poor retention with more top-of-funnel spend.
Use it when: Reviewing go-to-market efficiency or customer service costs.

13. “That’s an operational bottleneck.”

Translation: A person, process, or policy that slows execution speed or reduces net throughput.
Use it when: Pushing for simplification, automation, or reorgs.

14. “We are solving for optics, not outcomes.”

Translation: We’re polishing dashboards or OKRs while ignoring the real business impact.
Use it when: Reviewing exec presentations or quarterly planning.

15. “We need to push the reset button.”

Translation: Let’s proactively reset reality before it resets us.
Use it when: Downturns, missed milestones, or shifts in the market demand a narrative reset.

16. “Sunk Cost Thinking”

Translation: Making decisions based on past investments instead of future value.
Use it when: The future value is low or negative. “We’ve spent millions on that product line, but it’s time to stop our sunk cost thinking and discontinue the product.”

17. “Sensitivity”

Translation: The degree to which outputs change significantly based on small changes in input assumptions.
Use it when: "This model is highly sensitive to churn rates - each 1% costs us $3M in ARR."

18. “Material”

Translation: Something significant enough to require attention or action, especially at Board or investor level.
Use it when: "Any spend over $250K will be considered material and reviewed by Finance."

19. “Audit”

Translation: To inspect or validate. Often used metaphorically to reexamine assumptions, priorities, or systems.
Use it when: "Let’s audit our vendor stack. We have too many point solutions, too little ROI."

20. “Valuable Currency”

Translation: “Name” anything that captures value where we can spend the value on something else.
Use it when: Connecting with people IRL and their network. “Connection is the new currency.”

The Language of Business Playbook Summary:

Become fluent in every department’s dialect and then teach them the Language of Finance and the Language of Business.
Be the Chief Translator across all other departments.
Use financial headlines or metaphors to translate decisions and to get people to pay attention.
Identify and name the “taxes,” “costs,” and “risks” that others don’t see.
Avoid the financial echo chamber of details and complexity. Plain and simple builds trust. Translating effectively creates influence and alignment.
Build a shared operating vocabulary that unites strategy, structure, and execution.