SCOTT DETROW, HOST:
We are taking a moment today to leverage a renewed level of augmented business visualization and conversation marketing. It is an AI-based mobility solution enabled by our ecosystem of cradle-to-grave technological and results-driven profit optics - #leadership, #mentorship, #growthmindset.
If any of that reminds you of a recent company conference call or your LinkedIn feed, a recent study suggests this is more than just empty buzzwords. It concludes that people who really buy into corporate jargon might actually be worse at their jobs. Shane Littrell is a cognitive psychologist at Cornell University and the author of that study. He is here to cross leverage his synergy with us. Shane, welcome to ALL THINGS CONSIDERED.
SHANE LITTRELL: Hi.
DETROW: Why did you decide to focus on this? - because I do feel like it's everywhere, and it's particularly cartoonish on LinkedIn.
LITTRELL: (Laughter) One, I had a corporate job years ago, so I kind of already had a little bit of a taste of it. But, you know, corporate settings are saturated with these kind of authority cues, like titles and power hierarchies and leadership vision. And that kind of makes impressive sounding ambiguity especially easy to pass off as insight.
DETROW: You had a very technical, specific term for this phrasing. You called it corporate BS, but you used the fuller phrasing. How exactly did you define this and try and quantify it?
LITTRELL: So basically, what that means is that in these corporate settings, people sometimes use buzzwordy jargon-heavy language in a way that misleads others. They can do that intentionally. They want to distract from some problem that the company is about to have, or they're about to do layoffs or something. But people also do it in situations where they want to impress their colleagues and their coworkers so they can maybe try to more quickly climb the corporate ladder. They do this in a misleading way that makes it sound more important or impressive or smarter than it actually is.
DETROW: I guess, how did you measure this? And how did you come up with the takeaway that people who do this are not as good at their jobs?
LITTRELL: OK, so what I did was I combed through a bunch of different shareholder reports and interviews with Fortune 500 business executives, and I just found examples of sort of the nonsensical ways that they state things and phrase things in their messaging and public communications. And then I created this big, like, dictionary or word bank of all these nonsensical terms that I found, like, you know, synergy and value proposition and all these different terms. And I created an algorithm that would create new sentences based on these structures that sounded like real speech. On about 1,000 different workers, I basically just tested to see whether or not they could tell the difference between real language - 'cause I used real statements as well - versus these absurd, like, nonsensical statements. And people that struggle with that the most tend to also struggle with decision-making in the workplace.
DETROW: What's your takeaway for those of us who are #blessed to not be, you know, stuck in LinkedIn all the time? Like, is there anything that you think is applicable outside of a corporate meeting?
LITTRELL: Well, one thing that I try to make clear in the paper is there's a difference between nonsensical corporate BS and actual jargon. Jargon can be helpful because every company, every workspace has its own jargon. There are these initialisms and acronysms (ph) that actually help people communicate easier and more quickly. It becomes a problem when it starts to kind of take over, and it's used in these misleading ways. But one thing that my paper highlights is the fact that given the right circumstances, we are all susceptible to falling for this kind of nonsensical talk, not just necessarily the corporate style of BS but any kind of BS. People think they can spot it a lot better than they actually can spot it.
DETROW: Lastly, what is your favorite of these phrases to make fun of?
LITTRELL: OK, this is the one. I don't have the source for this one right in front of me, but there's one that says you have to appreciate that the milestones that we have set in these swim lanes provide a roadmap for this flow chart.
DETROW: I haven't heard swim lanes before.
LITTRELL: Yeah, they love the term swim lanes, and I have no idea why. They also talk about boiling the ocean a lot, too, which - a lot of water metaphors.
DETROW: I guess we're going to have to put a pin in this conversation here. That's Shane Littrell, a cognitive psychologist in the Department of Government at Cornell. Thanks for throwing some time on your calendar to spitball with us, Shane.
LITTRELL: Yeah, thank you. It was a great value proposition.
DETROW: Anytime (laughter).
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