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It's surprising to me that people don't consider these coded language.

Sure, the junior manager might use them vaguely to mimic, but IMHO, when vague language comes up at decision tables, it's usually coding something more precise in a sort of plausible deniability.

A senior manager on reviewing a proposal asks them to synergize with existing efforts: Your work is redundant you're wasting your time.

A senior director talks about better alignment of their various depts: We need to cut fat and merge, start identifying your bad players

etc etc.

If my impressions are correct, of course ICs are going to balk at these statements - they seem disconnected from reality and are magically disconnected from the effects on purpose. Yes, this is bad management to the ICs, but it's pretty culturally inevitable, I think, to have an in-group signalling their strategies using coded language.

A good manager takes this direction in front of all their ICs, laughs it off as corpo speak, but was given the signal to have a private talk with one of their group who triggered the problem... I dunno maybe my time in management was particularly distopian, but this seemed obvious once I saw it.

In the test these weren't coded language, they were randomly generated phrases. The finding is that the people who don't know how to decipher the code are easily impressed by it and have poor analytical skills.
Synergy has a real meaning: 1+1=3. A cigar and a whiskey. Chocolate and peanut butter. Hall and Oates. Et cetera. Unfortunately it's one of those terms like "DevOps" or "jam band" or "martini" whose true meaning has been sullied by people trying to sound cooler than they are.

On the rare occasions I've used it sincerely in meetings I've always caveated it with some variation of "the real meaning, not the BS one." This never seems to work so I've just dropped it from my verbal lexicon altogether.

> A senior manager on reviewing a proposal asks them to synergize with existing efforts: Your work is redundant you're wasting your time.

> A senior director talks about better alignment of their various depts: We need to cut fat and merge, start identifying your bad players

In my experience neither one of those are automatically a sign of impending layoffs. Rather, it's an executive doing their job (getting the organization moving in one direction) in the laziest way possible: by telling their directs to work out what that direction is amongst themselves and come back with a concrete proposal for review that they all agree on. The exec can then rubber-stamp it without seriously diving into the details, knowing that everyone relevant has had a hand in crafting the plan. And if it turns out those details are wrong, there's a ready fall guy to take the blame and save the exec's job, because they weren't the one who came up with it.

Interestingly, this is also the most efficient way for the organization to work. The executive is usually the least informed person in the organization; you most definitely do not want them coming up with a plan. Instead, you want the plan to come from the people who will be most affected, and who actually do know the details.

If the managers in question cannot agree or come up with a bad plan, then it's usually time for layoffs. A lot of this comes down to the manager having an intuitive sense of what the exec really wants, though, as well as good relationships and trust with their peers to align on a plan. The managers who usually navigate this most poorly (and get their whole team laid off in the process) are those who came from being a stellar IC and are still too thick in the details to compromise, the Clueless on the Gervais hierarchy.

There is also the signalling when a new, truly meaningless fragment pops up. The bigwig says it first, then his direct reports, then their underlings, etc.

So by using such a phrase, underlings signal both how close they are to bigwigs by knowing such a phrase first, and also demonstrate a vote for alignement, by quoting some phrases more and others less. Bigwigs raise status of underlings by repeating and expressing interest in their new phrases.

These phrases come and go in waves. Underlings laughing with them basically signal they are not worthy of attention in the political melee.

Do note that senior manager thinking the work is redundant also might be completely not aligned with reality. so "I think your work is redundant" is much closer to usual reality. And it's easy to be seen that as you pretty much also need to be a PR person for your own department, not just a manager, especially if department is doing necessary but not glorious tasks
More precisely than "plausible deniability", it is plausible EMOTIONAL deniability.

When you put enough bafflegab around it, you can almost ignore that you said something unpleasant. Because the part of our brains that processes for emotional content, doesn't process complex language very well. Hence the example with ten paragraphs of complexity to hide the pain of a major lay-off.

After I noticed this, I found that I did this. I reliably use complex language when I don't like what I'm saying. So much so that I could use readability checkers to find discomfort that I was not aware that I had!

And I'm not the only one to notice this. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fpVtJNv4ZNM for George Carlin's famous skit on how the honesty of the phrase "shell shock" over time got softened over time to "post-traumatic stress disorder". A phrase that can be understood, but no longer felt.

Corporations have just developed their own special complex language for this. And you're right. It is emotionally dishonest. That's why they do it.

> it's pretty culturally inevitable, I think, to have an in-group signalling their strategies using coded language.

Pretty shocking belief when you're of courseing all "ICs".

If it was inevitable than the amount and degree of corporate BS would've been stable over the last 5 decades, and across countries and languages.

In reality, it has been anything but, instead showing massive differences across both.

Yeah, I agree. Language has always been a tool for tribal gatekeeping and in-group signaling, but also as a tool for precision.

What's specifically interesting about corpo-speak though is it's one of the only version of this (at least that I know of) where it's main purpose is to be euphemistic. In most other fields, the coded language is meant to be more descriptive to the in-group. In management, the coded language is designed to be less descriptive on purpose to avoid the human cost of the decision.

It's dystopian because it follows the same patterns as military language, and serves the same purpose to sanitize unpleasant realities. "Neutralize the target" in military lingo, "Right-size" in corpo-speak. In both cases, the human at the end is stripped of their humanity into a target or resource to be managed (or killed).

Its an interesting take, bit why is this coded ingroup messaging is communicated to outgroup then?
If anyone wants a chuckle, I vibe-coded an endless supply of "synergizing paradigm" terms as a slideshow for a fake corporation. It's fun to put on in the background on a tv somewhere to see if anyone notices.

https://brightpath-global-solutions.com/

Edit: repo link: https://github.com/chronick/global-business-solutions

I suspect this is why formal languages exist; as a sieve to keep the hordes of fools at bay, and a system for turning bullshit into parse errors.

We are undoing much of this progress by now insisting everything be expressed in natural language for a machine to translate on our behalf, like a tour guide.

The natives will continue to speak amongst themselves in their mother tongue.

Last time I worked corporate, we were acquired and I was asked what my job was by somebody on the other side. I said “My job is to make you feel good about whatever it is that I may or may not be doing around this place.”

Despite it being a joke, I think there’s a lot of truth in there that explains corp-tongue -- from being visible in endless meetings to in-group parlance to cutthroat promotion tracks, a lot of corporate America boils down to narrative, storytelling and performance more than booking sensible profit and delivering the very best to client and user. This type of language and expression is a major tool for making people feel good about your actual, contestable value in an organization.

It’s both kabuki and kayfabe lol

The headline says these workers "might be bad at their jobs," but considered in the context of Graeber's "Bullshit Jobs" thesis - that a huge chunk of white-collar work is pointless make-work for surplus labor - then in a hierarchy that rewards BS-fluency (which Littrell speculates), they are actually _good_ at their jobs.

The study measures analytic thinking as a proxy for performance, but that is only the right metric if the organization rewards individuals on the basis of their ability to make good decisions. Which anyone who has spent time in a corporate setting will know is often far from the route to success in such a setting, regardless of what the organization would say.

If your role has no concrete output and your organization rewards BS-fluency, you need a jargon that performs productivity without being too specific - so this argot isn't useless, it maintains a hierarchy that the BS-fluent can be promoted through. Not so much a rising tide but a blocked toilet backing up through the org chart. And BS-receptive workers are more satisfied with their jobs, because by their organization's actual values (versus whatever might be written in the mission statement), they're succeeding.

The BS-intolerant and analytically competent are less satisfied because they're the ones running into the blockers that the BS is covering for - or working through them only to discover that there's no tangible work to do under all the jargon.

The takeaway for me is: if you're interviewing somewhere and the hiring manager starts talking about "actualizing synergistic paradigms" instead of telling you concretely what the team shipped last quarter, it is likely one of those organizations. Places that can tell you plainly what they do are the places where your work will matter.

A good takeaway line from the article:

> Rather than a ‘rising tide lifting all boats,’ a higher level of corporate BS in an organization acts more like a clogged toilet of inefficiency.”

and a link to the paper: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/400597536_The_Corpo...

In a discussion yesterday about a large and complex physical system that is hard to optimise further without more work for it to do (lots of excess capacity), the VP suggested we should 'consider how emergent technologies could be leveraged to decrease overhead'. It is a clever way to say, I have no ideas either, but if a better machine that hasn't been invented yet becomes available we should use that'. I say 'clever', because the other execs nodded in approval, and agreed. From other conversations I have had with him I was just glad he didn't say 'AI' as per usual, although I am in two minds as to whether he did actually mean AI, but thought he had said it too many times in the last week. I'm not popular because I ask difficult things like, what kind of AI?
These headlines are crack for HN.
"synergistic leadership" or "growth-hacking paradigms" are, in my opinion, what my teenage son refers to as "brain rot". I don't know where these people come from who make up these terms, or what childhood trauma has done this to them, but I absolutely cannot tolerate any of it, it makes my skin crawl.
How was this a surprise to anyone with more than three braincells?

But I guess it is good to have this study to point to in your workplace, instead of just seeing that it is self evident.

This is what offices exist for. In fields where efficiency matters, you end up with contractors, working remotely, getting paid by the project, and not being tied to one company. This is how lots of engineering and architecture works as well as many other fields.

In a work environment dominated by office social situations, language plays a key role in establishing social status, but there are other forms of posturing, with promotions generally based more on social status than job performance, reinforcing the social hierarchy. Technical buzzwords aren't even the only kind of jargon used in this manor, there's often an entire litany of language used outside of the job functions themselves. For example, human resources has its own language rules.

The author has come across this phenomenon and is attributing it to language alone, but there is far more involved here.

There does exist some purpose for corp-speak: it is a shared language for people in disparate parts of a large organization to communicate with. It is a tool, mostly for managers.

Managers use it with peers because their job is coordination and communication.

Managers shouldn’t talk to their reports in corp-speak, but think of it like a shared protocol for all messages in the corporate message bus.

Its describing every second LinkedIn post, no?
> “By getting our friends in the tent with our best practices, we will pressure-test a renewed level of adaptive coherence.”

That's what she said.

Corporate jargon is a relatively recent development in business history.[1] It wasn't seen much until the 1950s and 1960s, when "organization development" and management consulting became an industry. Peter Drucker seems to have popularized it in the 1980s.

Then came PowerPoint.

Before that it was more of a political and religious style of communication. In those areas, speeches and texts designed to be popular but not commit to much dominate. Religious texts are notorious for their ambiguity.

The point seems to be to express authority without taking responsibility.

[1] https://www.rivier.edu/academics/blog-posts/circling-back-on...

Note that this isn't a study of actual workplaces, it's based on cognitive tests, so "bad at their jobs" may be a stretch. For example, "overconfidence in one's intellectual and analytic abilities" may be good for business, e.g. when dealing with US government contracts in 2026.
Reminds me of how a Plumbus is made https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SWMGd_rzRdY
>Overall, the findings suggest that while “synergizing cross-collateralization” might sound impressive in a boardroom, this functionally misleading language can create an informational blindfold in corporate cultures

I believe this is the whole point. To confuse listeners and subtly manipulate them into thinking that they don't understand so they will stay quiet. Politicians do absolutely the same, in today's world it's called "smoke screen".

Corporate BS is the topic I want to study if I ever pursue a PhD. Not only BS that is directed from the top down, but also BS from the bottom and laterally. I'm curious what in corporate culture allows it to grow and what slows it. I also wonder if it's always bad or if it's beneficial in small amounts.

Anecdotally I have seen BS used to delay or avoid making commitments. BS can mask someone's lack of knowledge, or lack of execution. Middle managers seem to be the position to squash or spread BS. They often have a hard time detecting BS because they are too far from the work. When I think back to the best Directors and skip-level managers I have had in my career, they were all great BS detectors. They didn't let smooth talkers in their organization rise based on BS alone. They didn't let dependencies wriggle out of their commitments based on BS.

Corporate speak, as satirized in the Weird Al hit "Mission Statement", actually serves an important social function. It signals "I'm one of you, the business class, I will align my goals with those of the organization."

It's like that phenomenon of, you have these British people, Hyacinth Bucket types. They want to be seen as upper class when they're not. So they speak in an overly polite register that they think makes them sound upper class. Actual aristocrats, by contrast, speak rather plainly amongst each other. They know where they are in society, and they know that everyone else who matters also knows.

Similarly, the people who speak of operationalizing new strategies and leveraging core competencies are trying to sound impressive to those below, and like good little do bees to those above. The people who lead an organization to success speak in terms of the actual problems they encounter and the real things that need to be done to solve them.

George Orwell wrote about this 80 years ago: https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwel...
Won't forget from one of the Pratchett's book, where the word "synergy" was called a whore. Don't have the english edition of Going Postal handy to find the exact quote, but it was a glorious rant against a CEO's interview in the newspaper.
Isn't this just the obvious conclusion you would expect going in? Corporate bullshit is meant to sound impressive whilst simultaneously either saying nothing, or hiding the real meaning.

Synergy is a great example - what the person saying it hopes you understand is that Paramount Skydance and Warner Bros have a complimentary set of skills that when put together will be more profitable. What they actually mean is that when we merge these two companies we're going to have two sets of sales teams, two sets of marketing teams, two production teams, two sets of HR, accounts, back office etc. And so we're going to be more efficient because everyone I just mentioned is going to be fired.

So yeah of course, the intent is to trick you and the likelihood of success is (inversely) proportional to how smart you are and it turns out if you're smart you probably also do other parts of your job well.

Reminds me of the "Weird Al" Yankovic evergreen "Mission Statement": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GyV_UG60dD4
Isn't this the premise behind Dilbert?
I feel like this study is very naive about how corporate status and power works. Consider this part:

> Employees who are more likely to fall for corporate bullshit may help elevate the types of dysfunctional leaders who are more likely to use it

The rank and file don't elevate leaders, it's decided by higher-ups, and the higher you go the more they care about actual non-bullshit results. Where bullshit thrives is because higher level business strategy is actually hard and ambiguous, so there's a continuum of bullshit where you are expected to at least say credible things, but it's couched in bullshit terminology to broaden the range of success they can claim, and leave room and plausable deniability for failures. Strong leaders are keenly aware of this nuance, and therefore leaders are judged on reputation and outcomes over time, because any given thing they say may be wrong, but the track record is undeniable. This is why you never hear a bad word about leaders while they are there, they are just fired (or more likely "resign") one day seemingly out of the blue.

What this article misses is that to survive in a corporate environment everyone needs to put up and nod along to bullshit. Most of the time whether it's right or wrong and the level of bullshit doesn't really matter to most of the employees, they're just incentivized to play along and not express negativity. Within the rank and file, obviously some are more susceptible to bullshit than others, but I don't think this study necessarily gets at that, as a lot of people will act agreeable just to survive in corporate life, and their disposition will be largely independent of their true understanding and feelings about whatever bullshit they are presented with day to day.

“Employees who are more likely to fall for corporate bullshit may help elevate the types of dysfunctional leaders who are more likely to use it, creating a sort of negative feedback loop.

Technically that's a positive feedback loop, or reinforcing feedback loop. The author is probably using "negative" in to mean undesirable. Gotta get your jargon right!

To analyse the impact of this study I recommend that we set up an interdepartmental committee with fairly broad terms of reference so that at the end of the day we'll be in the position to think through the various implications and arrive at a decision based on long-term considerations rather than rush prematurely into precipitate and possibly ill-conceived action which might well have unforeseen repercussions.
I always thought one of the best promises of AI was to be able to feed it a 'jargon heavy' document (business contract, corporate policy, congressional bill, etc.), and have it spit out the real meaning in plain language.

"Don't sign this because you are screwed if x, y, or z happens!" would be a good summation in many cases.

Has anyone had much success with this kind of AI interaction?

Seems to be hugged to death. Link from The Wayback Machine:

https://web.archive.org/web/20260302211051/https://news.corn...

>Employees who are impressed by vague corporate-speak like “synergistic leadership,” or “growth-hacking paradigms” may struggle with practical decision-making, a new Cornell study reveals.

Wasn't it common knowledge that only cynics and idiots like those things?

That's basically 99% of what Dilbert and The Office are about.

There is a grotesquely pulsing layer of overconfident dumbasses in business (and society in general) and this is the language they speak. My job at any company, as far as I can see it, is to make sure my local orbit is cleared of these wackos. They are parasitic extractors of value and soul.
In hypnosis terms, this is confusion induction.
This has been proven out again and again in my experience. Going as far back as being a student advisor in college. Any time I would run into someone using these words (in advising sessions, interviews, casual conversation), the speaker had no further depth when pressed on the topic they were trying to wave at.
> Employees who are impressed by vague corporate-speak like “synergistic leadership,” or “growth-hacking paradigms” may struggle with practical decision-making, a new Cornell study reveals.

Hey, I find that type of lingo nauseating, and I still struggle with practical decision-making.

Based on how they conducted the test: - used an IQ / analytical test - correlated that to whether people cared about flowery language

Generally speaking, analytical people care more about numbers than words, so isn't this more of an 'expected result'?

I thought tfa would say seeking synergy is a sign one is struggling with ones own deliverables so one tries to add value elsewhere in the organization. Is synergy really such a poorly defined term that it's synonymous with corporate bullshit?
No love for Erving Goffman here at all?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Presentation_of_Self_in_Ev...

The original buzzword generator for palmOS. I used it extensively: https://archive.org/details/palm3_buzzword