We’ve all been there: in a work meeting, trying to stop our eyes from glazing over as a colleague spews an endless monologue about “leveraging the company’s adaptive strategy to optimize our value and reinvigorate our operations.”
That incomprehensible, buzzword-heavy language has a name: “corporate bulls–t.” That’s at least according to Shane Littrell, a cognitive psychologist and a postdoctoral researcher at Cornell University. He studies how people evaluate and share knowledge, and how misleading information shapes people’s beliefs, attitudes, and decision-making.
As a self-proclaimed BS-hater himself, Littrell defines BS as “dubious information that is misleadingly impressive, important, informative, or otherwise engaging.” It’s easy to mistake BS for the necessary, everyday jargon used in professional settings, but its distinguishing factor is that while the language intends to sound smart or impressive, it fails to be accurate, meaningful, or if at all helpful, he told Fortune.
Over four studies with 1,018 subjects, Littrell built the Corporate Bulls–t Receptivity Scale, a way to measure how attracted individuals are to this type of language and how business savvy they perceive different statements. People who find that buzzword-heavy corporate-speak profound and informative perform worse on measures of workplace leadership and decision-making. It does not mean people who are more receptive to corporate-speak are bad at their jobs, just that they may not make the best leaders or decision-makers.
It’s not about intelligence or education, Littrell said, who noted the results were uniform between studies where more than 70% of the participants had a bachelor’s degree or higher and those with less education.
“Part of that has to do with just the environment that you’re in. You have to use that language a little bit just to navigate the workspace,” he said. “Anybody can fall for bulls–t when it’s packaged up to appeal to your biases.”
The dangers of meaningless corporate-speak
The workplace is “fertile ground” for BS to fester, Littrell said, when you’re trying to impress your boss and compete with colleagues.
“These organizational settings are saturated with these authority cues, like job titles, and these power hierarchy structures, and everybody [is] talking about their leadership vision,” he explained. “It makes it especially easy to pass that off as insight. There are always people that are trying to climb the corporate ladder, and in a lot of situations, this type of language is used in a way to try to impress everyone around them.”
But corporate BS is more than just annoying, Littrell said. It can have a harmful effect on credibility and morale. This can be especially troubling when a leader uses it because it can undermine how employees understand goals, feedback, or decision-making.
Corporate-speak can also lead to reputational damage and financial cost for companies, Littrell said. He gave the example of a snafu PepsiCo found itself in 2008 after an internal report explaining the company’s $1 million logo redesign leaked online.
“The Pepsi DNA finds its origin in the dynamic of perimeter oscillations. This new identity manifests itself in an authentic geometry that is to become proprietary to the Pepsi culture,” the company’s design consultant, Peter Arnell Group, wrote in the internal report. “[The Pepsi Proposition is the] establishment of a gravitational pull to shift from a ‘transactional’ experience to an ‘invitational’ expression.”
This proposal was not only confusing, but also created a lasting internet and media embarrassment for the company. Even the design firm’s founder admitted that “it was all bulls–t.”
Establishing new norms can stop BS
It doesn’t have to be this way, Littrell said. A simple way companies can reverse course is by rewarding “anti-bulls–t” behavior by making clear communication the norm from the top down. This can stop a cycle where a leader uses convoluted language, and then employees feel like they have to speak that way, too.
He suggests establishing an environment that encourages people who aren’t the leaders to ask more questions, which can nip the impulse to appear like you know everything. “Sometimes people feel a social pressure where they don’t want to look stupid by answering like they think everybody else understands it, and they don’t want to raise their hand and ask a question, because they feel that that might make them look stupid,” he explained.
Lastly, he encourages companies to reward behaviors like clear communication and asking questions in performance reviews, which he says are very critical for establishing expectations.
“One of the more important conversations is those performance reviews and the way leaders and employees communicate with each other that can cause the most problems, especially in their personal success and the organization’s success.”
