This article is taken from the June 2026 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Find our subscription offers here.
If there were any justice in the world, Cornell University researcher and self-proclaimed “bullshitologist” Shane Littrell would be up for this year’s Nobel Prize for economics. His recent paper on corporate BS has troubling implications for all of us in business life — not just the cognitively frail who succumb most easily to its superficial charms.
At the heart of Littrell’s research was a “corporate bullshit generator” that churned out vacuous but important-sounding sentences such as, “We will actualize a renewed level of cradle-to-grave credentialing” and “By getting our friends in the tent with our best practices, we will pressure-test a renewed level of adaptive coherence”.
He then asked office workers to rate the “business savvy” of these computer-generated BS statements — alongside real and more meaningful quotes from business leaders. At the same time, he tested his subjects’ intelligence using established cognitive tests.
The key finding was this: those who were most impressed by the nonsense sentences were also the least intelligent. The research hints at a worrying deficit in critical thinking, which could lead to sloppy decision-making and, ultimately, negative commercial outcomes.
What Littrell’s research could not do was establish a trend over time — this was the first occasion that the BS Generator was unleashed on his office lab rats. But my instinct is that business is getting stupider and more credulous. In a moment, I will explain why and suggest some remedies.
However, let’s be clear on what we are not talking about. Firstly, we have to live with technical jargon. Actuaries, oil company geologists and software engineers cannot be expected to write board papers in the style of a Sun leader column. It is incumbent on directors to build enough expertise to understand and challenge a company’s wonks and geeks.
Loose thinking has always been with us, but this BS is new and has begun to tangle us like bindweed
Secondly, we have to learn to relax when faced with those irritating verbal tics that punctuate business meetings, such as “going forwards” or “in service of”. When you hear them, grind your teeth in silence. Remember, absolutely no one likes a pedant.
The BS we need to worry about includes those extended word salads awash with hyperbole, abstract nouns, vague metaphors and no hard facts. This sort of guff is now ubiquitous on LinkedIn, common in executive communications and, most worryingly, it appears more and more in board and management papers.
Loose thinking has always been with us. Not everyone can have the mental acuity of Steve Jobs in his prime. But this BS is new, and I think it began to tangle us like bindweed with the rise to fashion of stakeholder capitalism. If you ask an accountant to audit a company’s “purpose statement”, the inevitable result is a baffling word equation.
The post-Covid obsession with “colleague engagement” has made matters worse. Leaders are under pressure to increase the quantity of their internal communications — and that has led to a corresponding decline in quality. CEO messages abound with contorted perorations — “We must face our challenges and seize our opportunities” — and obfuscatory comments about transformation: “We must change, so that we can fulfil our unchanging mission”.
So, what can be done? I have a few suggestions. First, Ivy League MBAs should offer compulsory courses in Latin and Ancient Greek. Schools like Harvard already provide “enrichment modules” such as rowing on the Charles River or visits to a downtown foodbank — so adding Classics wouldn’t be a stretch.
The more that the next generation of leaders understand the deeper meaning of language, the less likely they are to abuse it.
Secondly, PowerPoint should be banned except for communicating statistical information. Brand temples, strategy wheels and organisational pyramids can look superficially compelling but also hide sloppy analysis and legitimise BS. There is no substitute for the traditional essay with a thesis, antithesis and synthesis.
I heard of one bank chairman who demanded that CEO candidates audition for a role by submitting a piece of prose written under exam conditions. He saw it as a way of filtering out the pernicious influences of the leadership coaches and management consultants. We need more of this rigour.
Finally, there is nothing that focuses the mind more than remembering who’s the real boss. It’s not the fragile ego of a virtue-signalling C-suite executive. Nor is it some nebulous “stakeholder group”.
The people who really matter are the investors who put their savings on the line to enable us to grow and prosper. Going forwards we should always be in service of them.
