Receive complimentary entry to the Editor’s Summary
Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, curates her preferred articles in this weekly dispatch.
For anyone desiring clarity on corporate nonsense, Microsoft’s Satya Nadella conveniently offered this succinct example. Concerning AI, he penned a few months ago: “We need to transcend the debates over simplicity versus complexity and establish a fresh balance in terms of our ‘theory of the mind’ that considers humans as being furnished with these new cognitive amplifier tools as we interact amongst ourselves.”
This mishmash — a quintessential rhetorical jumble that deploys vague concepts — suggests intelligence but carries minimal significance.
Prior to any Microsoft employee reaching out to champion their chief, allow me to propose that, as per a new investigation by Cornell University, if you are persuaded by Nadella’s statements, you might be ineffective in your role. It revealed that employees susceptible to corporate jargon (characterized as “deceptively grandiloquent drivel,” or “babble posing as sagacity”) exhibited diminished capacities for critical reasoning and sound judgement.
There is a measure of comfort — evidently, they also report elevated levels of professional contentment and perceive their superior as “forward-thinking and revolutionary.” Perhaps impressionable, yet contented.
In arriving at this finding, scholar Shane Littrell devised a “corporate bullshit generator,” utilizing business quotes and annual reports to invent vacuous business parlance, such as: “Working at the intersection of cross-collateralisation and blue-sky thinking, we will realize an elevated standard of cradle-to-grave credentialing.” Here’s another: “By engaging our associates in collaboration with our optimal methodologies, we will rigorously evaluate a renewed level of adaptive coherence.”
Those involved in the study (mostly from professional corporate experience, including personnel management, financial record-keeping, capital management, market promotion, and operational support) evaluated the jargon on a “commercial astuteness index” prior to undertaking competency assessments. And there’s an expanding area for scholarly inquiry by these professed experts in obfuscation. The forerunner was US philosopher Harry Frankfurt, whose 1986 essay proclaimed: “One of the most prominent characteristics of our culture is that there is so much bullshit.” In contrast to untruthfulness, which implies deliberate falsehood, jargon users are unconcerned with veracity. As articulated by Frankfurt, they do “not care whether [they] portray actuality accurately.”
Undoubtedly, social media has contributed to the proliferation of nonsense along with the rise of the self-proclaimed authority: these people can articulate opinions concerning the Strait of Hormuz, the fiscal aspects of shared eatery platters, and Matthieu Blazy’s most recent line for Chanel, all in a mere sixty seconds. The peril was underscored for me recently when I was asked to participate in a broadcast program to deliberate on an opinion I had shared on Bluesky. I refused, admitting I’d already imparted the entirety of my understanding, limited to roughly eighty words.
But LinkedIn’s computational logic appears to favor posts that sound like sheer gibberish. Unsurprising then, as business life is a fertile ground for jargon, with positions emerging that are incomprehensible to those unfamiliar. The cast of Friends attempted to explain this phenomenon when Monica and Rachel sought to characterize Chandler Bing’s work. “Something to do with numbers,” before eventually settling on a fictitious designation, “transponster.”
The deceased anthropologist David Graeber’s phrase “meaningless occupations” resonated with those exasperated by (or engaged in) an expanding class of administrative professions, whose work is “so completely futile, superfluous, or harmful that even the employee cannot validate its purpose.”
It is hardly astonishing that driven employees, prompted to “simulate success until achieved,” utilize sequences of fashionable terms with aspirations of professional progress or to divert focus from deficiencies. Ultimately, the precedent is frequently established by leadership, with equivocating chief executives.
To mitigate its detrimental propagation, an earlier cohort of scholars recommended a new framework. Understand the genesis of jargon; Identify its moments of generation; be aware of methods to oppose it; and Hinder its manifestation. I shall not elaborate further.
[email protected]