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I was surprised to come away from a recent training conference with the startling fact that my body contains enough energy to explode with the force of thirty hydrogen bombs. Not maybe the most useful information for management development, but a few weeks later it was the only thing I remembered from that day.

I had been watching a talk about business communication by, strangely enough, Bill Bryson the writer. He had been discussing how he had approached making the complexity of science accessible in his book, "A Short History of Nearly Everything." The session had many ideas we could all use to communicate better. My exploding body fact came from his explanation of Einstein's E=mc^2 equation, basically saying that there is an awful lot of energy tied up in everything. (It is on page 109 of the book if you want the long explanation.)

The talk made me think of how often in work we present things in an incredibly dry way. How many PowerPoint presentations have we had to endure with slide-after-slide of dull bullet-pointed lists? How many boring reports have we had to read? How many meetings have we had to listen to someone drone on in jargon? If only we could make things concise, fresh, anecdotal and, scariest of all, witty.

What came through in the session was how often Bryson used story telling with a human interest to write about science. Newton's laws of gravity may not be the most compelling read, but when accompanied by an account of how he - one of the greatest minds in history - was stupid enough to stare at the sun and nearly lose his eyesight, it is much more fun.

The management books that I remember best are often the ones written in an anecdotal style. Take Ken Blanchard's One-Minute Manager, which tells the story of one young man's journey to improve his career. It explains some basic concepts of delegation and motivation through a story. Best of all it is short; a couple of train journeys and it is finished!

Another example is in Myles Downey's Effective Coaching book. It talks about how to improve performance by bringing out a person's potential using a very non-traditional teaching method. Myles gives a short account of how a coach successfully trains someone how to catch a ball by merely getting them to focus on what the ball is doing in flight. The technique effectively makes them forget that they think they cannot catch. The passage really communicates the power of coaching and shows how different the process is to the lecturing style of teaching.

After the main interview we were invited to ask questions. Mr Bryson was asked what he thought of our workplace acronyms and jargon, he gave a short answer, "Don't like them!" and pointed out that the difficulty is getting people to admit that they do not understand them. I remember working on a new educational web site for the BBC. Each week we had a meeting on the project's progress, where we all nodded sagely to various three letter acronyms relating to the IT side of the project, the morass of qualifications we were writing about and the "best practice" management method that was being used. It was not till a year later, after a few drinks in a pub, that we all finally agreed that most of it had flummoxed us!

Business has so much jargon, much of it boringly over-used. It is far better - if we can - to communicate without them. So instead of implementing a 360-degree feedback programme, why not talk about making sure that staff understand how a range of people view their activities? We are all guilty - at times - of adding too much gobbledegook to try and make us look cleverer than we really are; but if Bill Bryson can explain the basics of Einstein's relativity, surely we can explain the concepts in all our own businesses in an understandable way.

So let's get rid of lines like: "Quality management is the process of ensuring that the quality expected by the customer is achieved." and say instead "We are going to make sure that we do the work that our customers have asked us for"? Let's get rid of boring cliched management speak like "failure to plan is planning to fail" and "blue sky thinking" and worn out phrases like "green business", "knowledge-based economy" and the "credit crunch" and make our communication novel, exciting and unique.

So next time you do a presentation or write a report try not to use any cliched phrases or acronyms. Think up some stories that illustrate what you're saying, they don't have to be the works of Jane Austen, just some specific anecdotes to illustrate a point. I cannot guarantee that your work will be a Bryson best seller but at least the rest of us will be more likely to remember it and learn something from it.