Corporate hogwash by any other name smells just as revolting as the poppycock it is
Washington University students were offered a new course in March, Calling Bulls**t In the Age of Big Data. For the past number of decades, week in and week out, I have been calling bulls**t, and so was delighted to hear my favourite pastime had made it into academia.
While this course is limited to spotting bulls**t in numbers, there is an equal need for one spotting it in words, especially words used in business. What follows is an outline for a rival course aimed to fill that gap.
It starts with a definition: “bullts**t” means nonsense, usually of a puffed-up variety that pretends to be something it is not. Sharp eyes will spot at once the difficulty in applying this to corporate life — almost everything fits the description. Before I have even got inside my office, I have tripped over a yellow plastic sign reading, “Caution Wet Floor” — bulls**t, because usually the floor is not wet, and if it were, the picture of someone falling spectacularly is wildly overdoing it.
The first rule about calling corporate bulls**t is not to do it too assiduously or you will go insane. I have learnt to ignore 95% of it and of the remainder ask: what is the quality and how damaging is it?
I have gone through dozens of examples of bulls**t in the past number of days and picked three that are worth calling. The first is a branding document produced for a new Pepsi logo in 2008 and resuscitated last week on Twitter. With diagrams comparing the Earth’s magnetic fields to “Pepsi energy fields” and text that reads: “The Pepsi DNA finds its origin in the dynamic of perimeter oscillations” — it is grade A, unadulterated BS. But on the second question, whether it was damaging, the answer is no. Pepsi changed its logo and carried on selling its brown sugar-water around the world willy-nilly.
Even so, bulls**t like this deserves to be called for its exceptional quality and because doing so might encourage its perpetrators to have a dark night of the soul in which they wonder what they are up to.
Exhibit two is a document from Deliveroo on its preferred language for describing the poor sods who cycle round with takeaways on their backs. The memo bans “employees”, replacing it with “independent suppliers” and forbids “pay” and “hiring”, preferring “invoices” and “onboarding”.
On the quality measure, this bulls**t is tame. “Independent supplier” and “invoice” are innocuous, and “onboarding”, though regrettable as a gerund, especially with no boat in sight, is so common, there is little point in protesting. But on the measure of harm, Deliveroo’s memo is wicked. It knows that if people used the ordinary words “employee” and “hire”, they might make the mistake of thinking they were due ordinary things such as holidays and sick pay — which Deliveroo doggedly denies them.
The third example comes from Jim Norton, who has the delightfully bulls**tty title of chief business officer, president of revenue at Condé Nast. Last week, he outlined his new strategy to all staff in a memo that began “Team” and proceeded with a stream of corporate nonsense about playbooks and journeys and wide arrays of differentiated solutions. It glossed over sackings as “hard personnel decisions”, only to declare the new corporate plan: “Condé Nast One”.
For companies to claim themselves “one” is standard bulls**t — it is a cliché and a lie, given the inevitable number of vested interests in any organisation. Condé Nast publishes Vanity Fair and The New Yorker, where standards of editing are so exacting that one of the latter’s editors has written a whole book based on the correct placement of a comma.
Norton may well bang on about the “heritage of quality journalism”, but had he asked his staff to edit his battle cry: “We will all transition this business together”, they would surely have told him “transition” is ugly as a verb, but as a transitive one it is a monster. He did not ask; what his staff did instead was read the memo, call it, and forward it to me. /©
THE FIRST RULE ABOUT CALLING CORPORATE BULLS**T IS NOT TO DO IT TOO ASSIDUOUSLY OR YOU WILL GO INSANE