Corporate Lingo Has Taken Its Toll On Everyone

Corporate lingo—or business bullshit—can be hard to penetrate or translate, and a good portion of it is actually nonsense. It can create as much worktime as it saves, by replacing meaningful exchange with jargon and obscure phrases.

In this history of how business bullshit became a common language that many non-businesspeople have unwittingly learned to speak, André Spicer traces business lingo from the emergence of management science all the way to today’s fad-ridden tech-obsessed corporate universe.

"A certain amount of empty talk is unavoidable when humans gather together in large groups, but the kind of bullshit through which we all have to wade every day is a remarkably recent creation."

Overall the picture that emerges is one of zombielike appropriation; but the question is why “otherwise smart people” end up speaking of “aha moments” and “thought leadership” as if these were meaningful concepts.

Perhaps it’s because they want to seem like experts, fluent in their field. But Spicer also draws from David Graeber’s work on bureaucracy to find that the managerial class have to come up with concepts that seem “scientific” in order just to justify their existence in a world where much bureaucratic labor is totally superfluous.

Spicer calls for an “anti-bullshit movement” that would banish corporate lingo not only from the corporate sphere, but from all of our lives. After all, every one of us has likely fallen into the trap of using a hollow phrase like “inboxing” by now.