Ever sat in a meeting where someone declares that your company is “growth-hacking” and “working at the intersection of cross-collateralization and blue-sky thinking” and called bullshit? Turns out you were right.
A new study out of Cornell University published in the journal Personality and Individual Differences found workers most excited and impressed by corporate speak may be the least equipped to make effective, practical business decisions, and it can leave companies with dysfunctional leaders.
Academically, “bullshit” is broadly defined as “a type of semantically, logically or epistemically dubious information that is misleadingly impressive, important, informative or otherwise engaging”, according to the study.
“Corporate bullshit” is a specific type of bullshit that uses puzzling corporate buzzwords and jargon and is ultimately “semantically empty and often confusing”, according to the research. It is often used by management to persuade and impress, sometimes to inflate perceptions of the company to workers and investors.
Corporate-speak is just how people gloss over the details while making others think they know what they’re talking about. It’s just the evolution of the basic investor sales tactic to sell something that doesn’t actually exist yet to get someone to pay for the development of that product. Only in this case they’re using the tactic on each other to get people to pay them money while providing no actual value while their subordinates are forced to waste time adapting their work to those nonsense words.
Of course they are. They can’t actually compete so they drink the kool-aid to justify keeping them around.
Managers love sycophants, then throw them under the bus in a bad quarter. See, good quarters are good management, bad quarters are bad workers.
“Leveraging”
wow. I must have been a great at my job. I mean that does not logically follow but, you know, feels good to think that way.
Correlation
I believe you meant to say:
Let’s double-click on this; it feels more like a parallel trajectory than a direct-impact lever.
(kindly corpofied by Kagi Translate)
