I’ve long maintained that a surefire way to improve corporate productivity and morale would be to fire virtually all chief people officers. Imagine my excitement this morning upon learning there is an academic study validating my instincts.
Chief people officers, or HR people as they were once known, and I rarely played well together. The low point came when I was running a division at a medium-sized PR firm in New York City and trying to recruit top-tier talent in an industry where there was very little to be had. I grew frustrated with the HR woman forwarding me resumes that didn’t excite or interest me. I politely told the woman that she was merely serving as a resume clearing house.
To which she replied: “Your standards are too high.”
Chief people officers rarely speak in plain and simple English. They specialize in phrases that appear meaningful while revealing almost nothing. Employees are not fired. They are “transitioned.” Cost cutting is reframed as “organizational realignment.” Layoffs become “rightsizing initiatives designed to position the company for future growth.”
Anyone who has sat through corporate town halls at publicly traded companies, which often serve as petri dishes for CPOs, knows the genre. Executives deliver speeches littered with words like “synergy,” “alignment,” and “stakeholder value.” CPOs, the ultimate corporate toadies, then enthusiastically circulate follow-up emails celebrating the company’s “shared mission” and “commitment to culture,” even if hundreds of employees have already been targeted for “strategic downsizing.”
It turns out there is an academic term for CPOspeak: corporate bullshit.
I kid you not.
Cornell University cognitive psychologist Shane Littrell has published a peer-reviewed study introducing what he calls the Corporate Bullshit Receptivity Scale, or CBSR. Littrell defines corporate bullshit not as all specialized workplace language, but as speech that is semantically empty, confusing, and functionally misleading while still sounding impressive.
That distinction matters because jargon is not the same thing as bullshit. Jargon can serve a legitimate purpose inside professions, helping specialists communicate efficiently with one another. Bullshit, by contrast, imitates the style of expertise while carefully avoiding actual meaning.
“With its reliance on inscrutable neologisms such as ‘growth-hacking,’ ‘thought showers,’ and ‘customer-differentiated value proposition,’ modern business culture often seems saturated with a unique style of seemingly incoherent, buzzword-heavy speech that impedes clear communication and disrupts operations,” Littrell writes. “Although terms like twaddle, ‘corporate claptrap,’ and ‘jargon monoxide’ have previously been used to describe this mode of speech, it is arguably best characterized as a specific category of bullshit.”
Broadly defined, Littrell writes, “bullshit is a type of semantically, logically, or epistemically dubious information that is misleadingly impressive, important, informative, or otherwise engaging.”
Littrell did not merely define corporate bullshit. He set out to measure how receptive employees are to it.
To do that, he created what can only be described as a corporate bullshit generator. The program stitched together the kinds of buzzwords commonly heard in boardrooms and strategy meetings to produce sentences that sounded impressive but conveyed little actual meaning. Among the examples were statements such as: “We will actualize a renewed level of cradle-to-grave credentialing,” and “By getting our friends in the tent with our best practices, we will pressure-test a renewed level of adaptive coherence.”
Littrell then asked more than 1,000 working adults in the United States and Canada to rate the “business savvy” of these statements alongside actual quotes from corporate leaders.
The results were revealing.
Employees who rated the meaningless buzzword statements as more impressive tended to score lower on measures associated with analytic thinking, cognitive reflection, and fluid intelligence. They also performed worse on tests designed to simulate practical workplace decision making.
The paradox did not end there. Workers who were more receptive to corporate bullshit were also more likely to describe their supervisors as charismatic and visionary, and they reported feeling more inspired by corporate mission statements.
In other words, the employees most impressed by visionary corporate rhetoric may also be the least equipped to evaluate whether the rhetoric makes any sense.
Littrell warns that this dynamic can create a self-reinforcing cycle inside organizations. Employees who are receptive to corporate bullshit may help elevate the kinds of leaders who rely on it. Those leaders then produce more of it, which further rewards employees inclined to admire it.
Rather than functioning like a rising tide lifting all boats, Littrell writes, a higher level of corporate bullshit inside an organization behaves more like “a clogged toilet of inefficiency.”
For years I have suspected that many CEOs did not reach the corner office because they were the most insightful or capable leaders in their organizations. Rather, they reached the top because they learned how to navigate the internal politics of large corporations. They mastered the art of sounding strategic, visionary, and indispensable in meetings where clarity is often less rewarded than confidence.
Littrell’s research suggests there may be a cognitive explanation for how that system perpetuates itself. Workers who are most impressed by impressive sounding, but meaningless rhetoric are also more likely to see their supervisors as visionary leaders. In other words, the employees most susceptible to corporate bullshit may also be helping propel the bullshitters up the corporate ladder.
The phenomenon often extends beyond company walls. PR-speak, a close cousin of HR-speak, often inversely reflects a company’s honesty and integrity. Firms that constantly proclaim their commitment to “purpose,” “values,” and “stakeholder engagement” too often make a mockery of those claims. Companies that behave responsibly prefer to let their actions speak for themselves.
If Littrell created a Corporate PR Bullshit Index and compared it with a company’s long-term stock performance, I suspect the results would prove illuminating.
Littrell has brought scientific rigor to the work of Scott Adams, whose Dilbert comic satirized the absurdities of corporate life. Dilbert featured a parade of familiar workplace characters: the Pointy-Haired Boss, who confidently issued nonsensical directives; Catbert, the sinister head of human resources; and Dilbert himself, the long-suffering engineer trapped in a world where management language often bore little relationship to reality.
Adams famously observed that in many organizations, the least effective workers are not pushed out of the system. They are promoted into management.
Adams died earlier this year, and in his final years he became mired in controversy. I suspect he’d be quite pleased with Littrell’s corporate bullshit research and findings.