The Current - Circling back: Corporate BS is driving us crazy

Episode Date: April 15, 2026

Every workplace has buzzwords and jargon. A new study shows that employees who are most impressed by it tend to be bad at analytical thinking and practical decisions. But before you get too smug, Cornell BS researcher Shane Littrell warns that all of us can fall for BS, depending on the circumstances.

You know that feeling when you reach the end of a really good true crime series? You want to know more, more about the people involved, where the case is now, and what it's like behind the scenes. I get that. I'm Kathleen Goldhar and on my podcast Crime Story, I speak with the leading storytellers of true crime to dig deeper into the cases we all just can't stop thinking about. Find crime story wherever you get your podcasts. This is a CBC podcast. Hello, I'm Matt Galloway, and this is the current podcast. Picture this. You're sitting at your desk. You open an email from your boss. It's the company's new

mission statement, and that mission statement reads, our purpose is to advance our blue sky possibilities by maximizing our efforts on cross-pollinating the actionable wisdom of our people. Are you impressed? Are you confused? Do you just want to get back to the spreadsheet you are working on? Your reaction may say something about how good you are, and your job. Shane LaTrell studies BS at Cornell University and his latest research on corporate BS looked at people's reaction to jargon and buzzwords. Also measured how that impacts some of their workplace skills. Shane, good morning. Good morning, man. How are you? And well, how do you, I think everybody probably has their own idea of what this is, but how do you define corporate BS?

Well, I'll try to avoid getting like too technical because whenever I get my real definition, it makes people's eyes glaze over. But it's basically the kind of semantically, what I call semantically empty. You know, it's not really saying much. Kind of buzzword heavy, jargony language that's used in corporate environments. But it's used in a way that's really vague and misleading. I call it functionally misleading. In other words, it doesn't really matter what the person means when they say it.

It misleads people no matter what. I heard somebody say that it can kind of give you the sense that you're saying something clever or smart, but it actually doesn't mean anything at all. Exactly. A lot of people use it to make what they're saying seem more impressive or important or their ideas deeper than they actually are. But sometimes it's also used to distract. So can you either be used to enhance what you're saying

or to distract away from something you don't want to say? Why is this so prevalent in the workplace, particularly in corporate workplaces? I think corporate settings especially, they're kind of saturated with what I call these authority, cues like titles and power hierarchies and, you know, there's all this language about leadership vision and it makes these impressive sounding kind of BS-y ambiguity, especially to pass off as easy insight. And these environments are also pretty competitive. You know, people are always trying

to climb the corporate ladder. So they often want to use whatever tactics they can to kind of get a leg up on their competition as they're trying to advance in their careers. So the belief is if you use some nonsense word salad that you are going to be, you're going to be able to climb that ladder better because people believe that you're smarter? Is that what it is? Sometimes, yeah, we've actually found in some of this work that's, and not just in corporate BS, I study BS in a lot of different applications as well, but sometimes we can use impressive sounding words to actually, they actually do sound impressive. I know I'm using impressive sounding to kind of sound like a majority here. But for a lot of people, they really do interpret these words as impressive. There's

been other work on something called neurojibberish, which shows that articles that people read, even in the news, if they contain these superfluous neuroscience-type buzzwords that we just kind of throw in, people actually feel that the article is more informative and that it's more intelligent than it actually is. And there's other work that shows if you just stick a picture of a brain randomly in an article about anything psychological, people interpret that as being more important and more informative than it actually is. What are the buzzwords that you can just throw into some article to make people feel like it's more informative?

Well, one that has been done before is a lot of people like to use the word quantum. You can throw the word quantum and it's just about anything. If you stick the prefix neuro on just about anything, like neuromarketing or neuropsychology, or neuro-whatever, that seems to make people think that this is, oh, this is important. This has to do with the brain. This is science-y. Therefore, it's smart. And if it's smart, then I want to know it.

I don't know if it's sciencey. But in your substack, you wrote about a couple of examples of corporate nonsense, BS, word salads. I'm going to read one. It's related to Starbucks, of all things. With every cup, with every conversation, with every community, we nurture the limitless possibilities of human connection. What is that about? I wish I knew.

I don't know what it has to do with coffee. I think what it's trying to do is create this impression in people's heads, especially since that's geared toward the employees, that the business isn't just about, you know, simply selling coffee, which it actually is simply about selling coffee. But they're trying to create this impression that it's, you're changing the world. If you work here, if you work for this company, you're not just giving people their morning caffeine.

You're impacting their lives in a positive way. So it's trying to imbue a false deeper sense of meaning and connection in what's going on, then maybe is actually practical. Limitless possibilities. That sounds great. Exactly. A human connection. This is from Pepsi, from internal documents that were leaked in 2009.

And the title of these documents, breathtaking. It says 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 Pepsi proposition is the establishment of a gravitational pull to shift from a transactional experience to an invitational expression. I almost can't get through it without laughing. That's not real. That's not real. It's like a physics textbook.

It is. Unfortunately, apparently it was real. It was from a, I guess, a marketing presentation that happened there as they were changing or updating their logo. Perimeter oscillations and the geometry of a gravity. This is sugar water that they're selling, right? I feel really bad for the employees who had to sit through that because they were probably as lost as we were listening to that. but they're not necessarily in a position to raise their hands and ask questions and kind of challenge that nonsense. You know, it's coming down from their bosses, so they kind of have to just go along with them.

Where does that come from? Somebody, I'm sure, is making more money than you and I to create this. Is that somebody's job to work through this? Is it AI? Well, that's from 2009, so it's probably not AI. Where is it coming from? There's a certain amount of BSing that happens in the workplace in general. You just, you know, it's kind of unavoidable.

But it's done in certain situations where you kind of have to get everybody on board with whatever this next initiative that the company is doing. Even if the leaders don't necessarily have as much confidence in it, you have to speak in a way that sounds authoritative and smart and we're on the right path. And I think that specific example went way overboard in the amount of smart sounding words that you have to use. I think instead of being like reasonable or believable, somebody just pulled like a physics textbook off the shelf and just started pulling out random words because that was an extreme example that I think is a lot less effective than a lot of BS can actually be. It's quantum BS. It's at a higher level. A neuro level. Yeah, a neuro level.

Well done. So you looked into who is most open to this kind of talk. And part of this was like you created a, what, a corporate BS generator? Yeah. And this was, because people have asked me, you know, why didn't you just use AI? When I started this project, AI was not all that great. I couldn't get it to create the type of BS that I needed because it kept creating sentences that made sense. I'm trying to, like, to be able to measure this properly, I needed to create extreme examples that don't make sense,

except to a small segment of the population. So what I did was I just went through a bunch of, like, shareholder reports and financial reports released by companies and interviews with CEOs and other Fortune 500 business executives. And I took out some of the most, I guess you'd say, BSE statements that were made. And what I did was I just removed all the nouns, verbs, adjectives from them. So they're just these Senate skeletons. I don't know if you guys had this in Canada.

I'm from Tennessee originally. And we had these things called Madlibs when I was a kid. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So it's basically a computerized version on some level of like a Madlibs thing. So I created this library of corporate words like fractional management and high state credentialing and blue sky thinking and all these things. And I created an Alibald. that would take these sentence skeletons and randomly populate them with words in a way that

it's not trying to make something that makes sense, right? And it would spit out these BS statements. And what I did was I took those computer-generated corporate BS statements, and I mixed them with real statements from real people. And what I found was that there is a certain percentage of the working population that finds, they not only find the corporate generated BS statements, like really impressive. I ask them if it strikes them as showing business savvy, like somebody that has really high business skills. So they not only are impressed with those statements, but they have trouble telling the difference between the corporate generated statements and like the real language, like the real statements. And the people that have that issue,

They have more difficulty telling these statements apart. They tended to score lower on measures of work-related decision-making. They also scored a little bit lower on measures of analytic thinking. I don't think that's quite as important as a lot of people on LinkedIn just kind of took this study and ran with it. And they started claiming that, oh, if you fall for BS, that means you're stupid. But it doesn't because what it shows is that anybody can fall for BS when it is perfect. crafted to appeal to their biases. To somebody that's in a corporate environment all the time,

and that's their work, and they're surrounded by all these different cues and different ways of speaking, they're much more susceptible to this type of BS. But that also applies to us, because we can, you know, us non-corporate types can be in these other types of environments where there's BS that's crafted to whatever our bias happens to be. And we can wind up falling for it. And it's not just an intelligence or an analytic thing. kind of thing, we're all susceptible to this. Hi, Steve Patterson here, host of The Debaters. You know, the show where Canada's top comedians go head to head on topics like,

should everyone join a book club? This is kind of like our own version of Canada reads, except there's more arguing by people who've read less books, and I'm clearly not, Ali Hassan. Anyway, book some time and listen to this week's episode of The Debaters, wherever you get your podcasts. If you can pry yourself away from that book you're reading. I want to read one of the things that your BS generator spat out, which is working at the intersection of cross collateralization and blue sky thinking, we will actualize a renewed level of cradle to grave credentialing. That sounds impressive, I think.

I'm inspired. I think. Do you need somebody in your job who believes that, who is willing to kind of take, a phrase like that on and think, yeah, that's inspiring. And I might, I want to strive towards cradle to grade credentialing. Do you need those people in your workplace? I think it depends on the position that you're in. If you're a leader with really weak ideas, then I think you might need those types of people in your organization to, to support and go along with what you're saying. But as I talk about in the papers, sometimes, you know, because

see, everybody likes to have cheerleaders, right? You like to have people that's like, yeah, that's a great idea. But when it spins out of control, when you have too many people that within any space, not just an organization, but any space, who are too willing to go along with weak ideas, it can have negative impacts. And I discussed some of these in the paper and in the substack article of examples of companies and situations where people went along with weak ideas based on what they were told, and it led to not just financial issues, but legal issues. Like, I talk about the example of Theranos and Elizabeth Holmes, and, you know, if anybody doesn't remember that, that was the person that came up with the company and they had this blood

test and it was going to supposedly accurately detect all kinds of different diseases. And then this goes back to my point earlier about it's not just about, like, intelligence or analytic thinking. she was able to BS Fortune 500 business leaders and scientists and other people who were very intelligent just because she was very highly skilled at the way that she leveraged this kind of misleading language. And that's the cost of this. I mean, aside from it being just really annoying is that there can be real, not just money costs, but real world consequences for this that extend beyond the balance sheet.

Exactly. I think back to the Pepsi example you used earlier. They suffered reputational damage for that. Not only did they shell out a lot of money on that marketing initiative, but once that paper came out into the public, there were dozens of articles basically lampooning the company and making fun of it for even wasting money on this. So they suffered reputational damage from that, not just financial. Aside from being amused slash annoyed by this, what is your own personal interest in corporate? BS? Corporate BS. I just think, because I study BS at a lot of applications, but I think I used to have a corporate job before I quit and went back to academia.

I worked in restaurants for like 20 years. And was that workplace filled with BS? When you got to a certain level, yeah. A lot of corporate restaurants are very corporate. You know, and you mentioned this earlier, I talked about it

in the article where just some of the language that was used, I couldn't figure out what they were talking about. And the more questions I asked, the more I realized they didn't really know what they were talking about either, they were just trying to sound smart. Was this in the email that you got about the budget? Oh, yeah, about the, um, those are vice president of finance. He likes to use words like, um, derivate, which isn't really, isn't really a word in the sense that he was using it and, uh, download on. And he liked to talk about, um, uh, maximally functional flow through, which, you know, and that was just something on a spreadsheet he sent me.

When I asked him what flow through was, it created this like existential crisis in the upper leadership of the company where he was, my direct supervisor couldn't answer the question. So he sent me onto somebody else who called me who couldn't answer the question, who sent me onto somebody else. And I finally realized that so many people in that company were just using words they didn't understand in a way to kind of, like I said, or give these authority cues. I'm smarter. I'm in control. I know these things that you don't know. And at that point, it kind of opened my eyes.

And that experience was always sitting in the back of my mind as I went back to academia and started studying BS and BSing, like, scientifically. And it just kind of hit me like two years ago when I started working on this project. Why have I not applied this to a situation from my own background, my own experience? Because corporations and politics, I think, are the perfect environments for this type of study. So if you're the boss, what do you do about this? I want to ask about politics in a moment, but what do you do about this if you're the boss in a corporate environment? Can you eliminate this sort of nonsense? The words that don't mean anything, the word salad, the corporaties, as somebody called it?

Yeah, this may sound depressing to some out there. I don't think we're ever going to be able to completely eliminate it. Because especially in corporate environments, they're just built. on the type of messaging and language that uses, you know, buzzwords and jargon. And that's not necessarily a bad thing because I distinguish in the paper between jargon, which is using, you know, buzzwords and shorthand language and kind of organizational slang in a way that's effective. It makes communication quicker and easier sometimes. You hear this a lot, like if you go to the emergency room, they're throwing out like, I need a CBC, a Ken 10 and light.

They're ordering all these things, and they're not saying, give me a complete blood count, check the electrolyte level. They're throwing out slang because it makes the communication quicker and easier and more efficient. So there is that aspect to corporate environments that will always exist. They need that kind of functionally efficient language. And that's what makes corporate BS kind of unavoidable because people who are trying to mislead and manipulate and climb the corporate ladder or avoid accountability. can I always use the word leverage and people hate the word leverage because they think that's a BS term, but it means to use something for an advantage. So they can leverage that type of buzzwordy language in a way that benefits them. And that's why I think it's never going to really go away.

But to your question about what can leaders do about this, well, they can start focusing truly on communicating with clarity. They can attempt to create an environment that encourages people to ask questions by, you know, know, if you publicly praise good faith attempts at clarification, so a lot of leaders don't like to be questioned. But if you can encourage that environment, like if you're giving a talk and you say something, make it an acceptable, welcome thing for people to ask questions. That way you can respond with, you know, thanks, that's a great question. So let me take this opportunity to rephrase that in a clearer way. So you can ensure that this type of, that your messaging is clear. And, you know, in more extreme cases, you may be in a company that it's just the vague BSE language is everywhere.

You might need to, you know, institute some sort of templates, like anti-BS templates that kind of force company-wide messaging to like this straightforward concrete claims. And you can even incorporate these standards into performance reviews, like reward employees and leaders who speak clearly and plainly. don't just say, oh, thanks, that's a great question in a meeting. Like reward them for it. Like give them credit for communicating clearly and playly or flagging empty claims or, you know, turning ambiguity into actual actionable plans. So it's about kind of an environmental shift. You have to reward clear communication.

Do you worry just finally? And it's not even, we haven't even talked really about AI and the fact that AI can amplify this and goose this in ways that we couldn't possibly. imagine, but it's, do you worry that we just, we're meridating right now in a world filled with BS, that whether it's politics and politicians who don't want accountability, corporate leaders who are avoiding accountability, those in power who managed to say a big, long answer to a question and don't say anything at all, that that surrounds us. Yeah. I'm not willing to say that the problem, like the, the actual extent of BS and BSing is

necessarily worse, but our ease of access to it is certainly a lot worse these days because of social media and the internet and even AI can generate really impressive sounding fluff. And I think, you know, my work helps make sense of the current social media or AI or kind of even political climate they're in because not all misleading rhetoric works the same way. It's not always just about truth versus lies. You know, sometimes it's about misleading people just by sounding impressive without actually being clear. And sometimes it's, like you said, it's about avoiding providing a clear answer altogether. So I think because my work on corporate BAS specifically, it helps explain, you know, by vague, but Polish language can, you know, still land with some audiences.

And I think my work on just BS more broadly helps explain there, you know, there's two different types of tactics going on. One's trying to win people over with misleading claims that sound impressive, but really aren't. And the other is trying to mislead people by distracting them from the truth and escape accountability without technically saying much at all. And I think AI and just, you know,

the type of media environment we're in just facilitates that. It makes it easier to do. But I don't, just to be, you know, somewhat encouraging. I don't want it to be all doom and gloom. My work with BS, but also with conspiracy theories, I do a lot of research on conspiracy belief, too,

shows that just because this type of stuff spreads more easily doesn't mean that people fall for it more easily. So there is a little bit of, you know, light on the horizon there that I don't think people are increasing in their gullibility. There's a lot of people that are, the more BS is out there, the more people are able to see it and, and recognize it and be able to turn away from it. So there is some hope that we're not becoming more susceptible to it, even though it's everywhere. Shane, this is fascinating. It feels like a conversation of our time in some ways and the fact that everybody's an expert on anything.

And it doesn't matter how little or much you know about it, you have the opportunity now through social media to spout off and tell people what you don't really know. This is fascinating. Thank you very much. Yeah, thank you, Matt. Shane LaTrell is a postdoctoral researcher at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York Studies, Corporate B.S. You've been listening to the current podcast. My name is Matt Galloway. Thanks for listening. I'll talk to you soon. For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca.ca slash podcasts.