The impact of global branding has forced a lot of seemingly meaningless phrases into the everyday language of business. A classic example is how the word “challenges” has replaced the word “problems”. CEOs put out annual newsletters to employers, whose descriptive outline over pages can be summed up as “we had a lousy year, no pay rises next month and I am trying to hide it”.

One such glib output is “win-win”. Ever looked it up? You can get lost going into websites about a film, a political forum, a Hebrew ads column and more.

What prompted me to think about this was a blog posting by Naomi Elbinger, as she referred to another successful event at the Jerusalem Business Networking Forum (JBNF). Naomi played a 90 minute game of FreshBiz, invented by some Israelis that is promoted as “Changing the way you play business and life”.

Naomi wanted to win, ended up in a stalemate, having realized too late that the only way for her make-believe business to grow was by helping others along the way. Yes, win–win.

Take two other scenarios that I have encountered with differing Jerusalem businesses. One is having their professional website evaluated by an expert. Bottom line, the content is fine, but the message is all about what the site owner can provide. It does not talk about the needs of their own potential customers.

In other words, the feeling is too one-sided. And that may explain why not enough customers are drawn to signing up via the site for new orders.

In a separate discussion, I learned of two teams from the same company department that were given separate tasks in a training programme. Each was briefed independently, without knowing what was the mission of the other group. Actually, they were both given banal challenges – to insist on receiving a cake with their coffee at 11.00am on Fridays, and to have an extra 5 minute lunch break.

However, because an element of secrecy (and thus distrust) had been introduced, both teams upped their demands in order to ‘compromise’ at the level of original target; extra cakes or 10 minutes. The result was chaos, shouting, even lying; all this amongst colleagues. And what should have been the solution?

Just talk to each other and see how you can help, mutually. Lay out your issues openly. 99% of people genuinely wish to support others, without an expectation of remuneration. In turn, just look how you may benefit,….or should I say win?