By Peter Cappelli

The topic of business buzzwords is always fun as we try to identify our ever-changing list of favorites. “Stay in your swim lane” is one of my favs now. It turns out our colleagues in psychology have looked at this more seriously, differentiating between individual buzzwords, which sound like jargon, and stringing them together into something they call “Corporate Bullshit.” If you are wondering if there is now a field called “Corporate Bullshit Studies,” I think the answer is yes, and they find a lot to study. 

Let’s turn to a new study designed to help other researchers get into this topic,  “The Corporate Bullshit Receptivity Scale.”  Surprising to me anyway, this is not the only psychological scale used to assess the idea, so there is competition in “Bullshit Studies.”  The first question is: Can we differentiate BS from statements that just have jargon in them where jargon is a short-hand term? I think the idea is that if you took a statement and diagramed it (if anyone nowadays knows how to do that), could you make sense of it?  If the answer is no, then it probably meets the test. Here’s an example from the study of real BS. 

“Working at the intersection of cross-collateralization and blue-sky thinking, we will actualize a renewed level of cradle-to-grave credentialing and end-state vision in a world defined by architecting to potentiate on a vertical landscape.” 

Other research has found that most corporate mission statements are “bullshit adjacent,” which means pretty close to full-fledged BS. These phrases seem like they come from engineering or the military, places where the language is hard and gets down to the practical.  

The conclusion of the study seems to be yes, we can tell them apart.  The more contentious part of the study is the idea that some people are more susceptible to these statements, which means, to what extent do you believe these statements actually says something meaningful and possibly important. I wouldn’t take this evidence as gospel, but people who are open minded, more able to reason, and are reflective are less susceptible to them.  Put differently, my read is that people who are more gullible are more susceptible.   

And now with AI tools, we have an unlimited capability of producing corporate BS much faster and cheaper than employees could do it.  I asked ChatGpt to produce a mission statement that was full of BS and got the following. 

“We leverage synergistic paradigms to holistically optimize scalable value streams, driving innovative, customer-centric solutions that empower stakeholders and maximize sustainable growth across dynamic global ecosystems.” 

One thing about BS statements that makes them jarring is that they often are grammatically incorrect. Not just the usual splitting of infinitives but turning nouns into verbs like credentialling. 

Why does any of this matter if it is true that corporate BS statements don’t really convey any real meaning? 

Before that comes the question as to why statements like these get produced in the first place. I think it is because organizations know they should be communicating to employees but they also know that they can get in more trouble if they say something wrong than any benefit that they get from saying something useful.  That is why corporate mission statements are so much BS because they seem necessary to do but there is much more downside than upside to them. So they use some terms that sound serious—contemporary buzzwords—but together say nothing.   

Does it matter to have these nonsense statements? How does it affect employees? Those who are more open-minded, more able to reason, and are reflective are likely to recognize that they say nothing and become dismissive of corporate communications and possibly become less confident about the competence of their organization. How about employees who are gullible? At first, it’s got to make one feel inadequate to not understand them, but after a while, I suspect they just learn to tune it all out.      

Maybe the point is for our communications colleagues to push back just a little bit and see if whoever is issuing the statements can be pushed to say what they really mean because what they are doing now is at best a waste of time.   

Peter Cappelli is the George W. Taylor professor of management and the director of The Center for Human Resources for The Wharton School.