Comment by jvanderbot
15 hours ago
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.
The Gervais Principle by the Ribbonfarm guy gets into this: powertalk vs. babytalk
https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...
the Cornell article is basically just empirical testing of these concepts.
Also summarised in https://alexdanco.com/2021/01/22/the-michael-scott-theory-of...
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from TFA:
> “Corporate bullshit is a specific style of communication that uses confusing, abstract buzzwords in a functionally misleading way,” said Littrell, a postdoctoral researcher in the College of Arts and Sciences. “Unlike technical jargon, which can sometimes make office communication a little easier, corporate bullshit confuses rather than clarifies. It may sound impressive, but it is semantically empty.”
I'm taking issue with "semantically empty" and saying they're actually semantically rich, but they are coded signals. Coded signals become increasingly indistinguishable from noise.
But they're not semantically rich. People who speak the code aren't doing it to more efficiently communicate, such that a long and complicated message can be expressed quickly. They are taking a short simple message, stripping away all the details, then padding it such that it becomes more verbose and vapid. This makes the real message harder to decipher for the uninitiated, it removes information even for those who understand the code, and it serves as a display for people who appreciate the flourish. There may still be some meaning left, but it's semantically emptier.
Further much of it is not even code. Examples like the microsoft letter are clearly a performative act to soften the blow of bad news. No one in the know is reading such an email to discern some hidden message; it's written to not be read.
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I'm always reminded of Asimov's Lord Dorwin: "[the linguistic analyst] after two days of steady work, succeeded in eliminating meaningless statements, vague gibberish, useless qualifications—in short all the goo and dribble—he found he had nothing left. Lord Dorwin, gentlemen, in five days of discussion didn’t say one damned thing, and said it so you never noticed."
In some cases, sure, they're semantically rich, but the result here is that in some cases it doesn't matter whether they are or not, that some people can't tell. That can still be true even if corporate jargon originated and is sometimes still used for rational-ish reasons.
> Eventually they figured out that language served a different purpose inside the bond market than it did in the outside world. Bond market terminology was designed less to convey meaning than to bewilder outsiders. Overpriced bonds were not "expensive" overpriced bonds were "rich," which almost made them sound like something you should buy. The floors of subprime mortgage bonds were not called floors--or anything else that might lead the bond buyer to form any sort of concrete image in his mind--but tranches. The bottom tranche--the risky ground floor--was not called the ground floor but the mezzanine, or the mezz, which made it sound less like a dangerous investment and more like a highly prized seat in a domed stadium. A CDO composed of nothing but the riskiest, mezzanine layer of subprime mortgages was not called a subprime-backed CDO but a "structured finance CDO." "There was so much confusion about the different terms," said Charlie. "In the course of trying to figure it out, we realize that there's a reason why it doesn't quite make sense to us. It's because it doesn't quite make sense."
The Big Short by Michael Lewis, page 101.
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yeah, this is frankly isn't really showing what people think it's showing. The "not bullshit" examples are all manager-speak and coded phrases like
"We plan to right-size our manufacturing operations to align to the new strategy and take advantage of integration opportunities."
What the study actually shows is that less skilled people find it harder to distinguish this sort of way of saying jobs are being lost or puffery about "we have permission from the market to be a world class, tier one partner" from generated manager speak that's incoherent or mixes the metaphors up like "covering all bases of the low hanging fruit" or "drilling down one more click on people"). Probably because those less skilled people have poorer reading comprehension in general and typically less exposure to corporate environments.
Or that those “nonsense” phrases are not actually nonsense when spoken by a manager.
The conclusion they’re nonsense comes from the random generation and the technical perspective on semantics; but it’s entirely possible they’re generating phrases that do have semantic meaning when said by a manager… and hence their whole study is flawed.
They quietly assume their conclusion, when assuming their generated phrases are vacuous rather than contain coded semantic content.
> 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.
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.
That's the right move. If a word changes its colloquial meaning, better drop it and find a new one. Happens all the time. From stuff like "agile" in a software development context (pretty meaningless at this point, can mean anything from the original definition to the systematic micro management it got to be commonly associated with), to previously neutral words that became offensive (because they were commonly used as such).
No individual holds power over connotations. Language just evolves.
> No individual holds power over connotations. Language just evolves.
Okay, but I still reserve the right to be pissed off at teenagers using 'out of pocket' when they mean 'off the wall' or 'out of bounds'.
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I always avoid synergy and say "bigger than the sum of its parts" or "peanut butter and jelly". Simple language with less baggage.
...except for those of us who think that PB&J is a culinary abomination in which case the metaphor disintegrates ;-D (apologies to my mother for having to make me PB-only sandwiches growing up)
I do wonder whether adding chips or bacon to counteract the cloying one-dimensional sweetness of the other ingredients would make me a fan though... chunky natural PB, blackberry jelly, hickory-smoked bacon on ciabatta? Hipster PbB&J might be the ticket.
Why would you drop it altogether? Medications and/or supplements can have synergistic effects, for example. Synergy is actually a term that is formally defined as "Effect(A + B) > Effect(A) + Effect(B)".
The point of saying and writing things is to be understood by your audience.
If I know a given wording is widely misunderstood, to the point I'm planning to immediately follow it with a clarification - often that's a sign it's not a very good wording.
There are exceptions, of course - go ahead and say Cephalopods (things like octopuses and squid) if you're a marine biology educator.
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Synergy often means layoffs. As in, we merged two companies and now have two of every department, one of each has to go, and the remainder can do the work of both (yay synergy).
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.
At my final Job, I jokingly used the word SPITBALL… in no time, everyone was saying…. I’m just spitballing here…. So funny.
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.
Its an interesting take, bit why is this coded ingroup messaging is communicated to outgroup then?
One example elaborated:
You _want_ most ICs to ignore a negative message that doesn't involve them, and you _want_ to give middle / lower managers the discretion to address an ICs "nonsynergistic" contributions on their own time. It's a signal not a prescription. This allows a public person to make a public statement and set direction without prescribing actions so lower management and ICs can do their thing.
Upper management becomes increasingly vibes-based, from what I can tell.
It would be a hell of a lot more functional to simply say directly what you want and mean.
This sort of management is dysfunctional even in it's premises.
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For a somewhat cynical explanation of why that happens, I recommend https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-....
As with all forms of cynicism, it has a grain of truth. And a much larger grain of truth than is comfortable.
Also see Scott Alexander's review
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-gervais-pri...
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To solidfy the in-ness of the in-group. To underscore that management is better than ICs and ICs are considered other
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).
It's not like they're very subtle about this with their "human resources" horror speak.
That's why they call them People Team now! I still call them HR, but they call themselves and management calls them The People Team.
Can we go back to Personnel or Staffing? Those are nice and neutral by today's standards...
For anyone else as confused as I was; apparently "IC" means Individual Contributor, as opposed to leadership or management.
Let's play "spot the manager"
I don't mean to shame anyone for learning new information, but even if you have no interest in management, your career will benefit greatly from knowing the terms and concepts that managers in your industry commonly use. There's a lot of people out there who are aggressively against learning "corporate jargon" and then find themselves lost trying to understand why their company's leaders talk and act the way they do.
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When I was hired at my current role, it was clear to me that I'm in an IC vs Management position. It's really not that weird and is a very common term.
I think this also explains some of our political climate. Everything the current administration says sounds like gibberish and equivocation to me, but to its intended audience it is a clear communication about wielding power and grift.
Conversely, when someone talks about "decolonizing" a curriculum or "centering" marginalized voices, to me it's a clear statement about who gets to define meaning and whose history counts, but to my Boomer uncle it's incoherent, if not an outright attack.
You are correct. These types of jargon are signaling specific ideologies which if explained fully would be rejected by rational people. Both sides do this but currently the left is doing it more (was different in the past).
For example, the current energy policies are more environmentally friendly than under previous administrations. This is because of previous admins objections to nuclear power. The environmental movement's pushed energy polices are a bit like trying to trim your monthly expenses by changing to a type of tea that is 5% cheaper but not refinancing your mortgage. This only makes sense to the scientifically literate (in this specific domain), not the wider population (which is why you don't understand it). Yet this position is clearly correct and backed up by a mountain of numbers, data and evidence.
PS This doesn't mean your Boomer uncle has any insight, a broken watch is right 2x a day. It is a sign of just how extreme some parts of the left have become that it seems that way.
Well, I'm glad that only people who agree with you are rational.
> to my Boomer uncle it's incoherent, if not an outright attack.
These are separate things. If he's interpreting it as an outright attack, he _is_ hearing it correctly. But incoherence would imply he's _not_ hearing the coded language in it's true meaning.
> The Russian language has two different words for what most European languages would describe as lies. One is lozh (ложь), best translated into what we consider to be a lie; something that is the opposite of the truth. There is also vranyo (враньё). Vranyo is more than a simple lie. It is described as: ‘You know I’m lying, and I know that you know, and you know that I know that you know, but I go ahead with a straight face, and you nod seriously and take notes.’
Trump is taking a lesson from Putin. Social media makes this extra easy, as you can bury criticism with a hoard of what-aboutism-bots, redirected arguments, and straight up BS.
see also: https://militairespectator.nl/artikelen/vranyo
Yes I too have seen the 2022 Perun video where an Australian Youtuber gives a lesson on Russian linguisics, but I'm not certain he's right.
English also has more than one words for lies - lies, falsehoods, fibs, bs, prevarication.
Yeah sometimes we know stuff is a load of crap at work, but we gotta humour the process. Maybe it's 10x as bad in Russia. But I've seen little independent evidence those words Perun used mean completely different things, I think he's just accidently exhaggerating a possible bit of nuance.
My first language is Russian. I’m not young, so I remember a bit of the Soviet era and many of the paper books I read as a child. I perceive lozh and vranyo as nearly synonymous, depending on the context. The only difference I notice is that vranyo can occur without ill intent, while lozh is told deliberately to deceive.
I found the source of this new alternative interpretation https://theconversation.com/ukraine-war-vranyo-russian-for-w...
I call it BS.
> "decolonizing" a curriculum or "centering" marginalized voices
Can you expand on this?
Those are just examples of academic/progressive jargon that I hear often in the Bay Area and in progressive circles. "Decolonizing," could mean for instance changing world history curriculum to cover non-western civilizations. "Centering" seems like maybe it just means focusing on, but there is a whole academic apparatus for designing curriculum around say, indigenous practices, and centering is the word used for that entire concept, which includes specific techniques.
I think to get the full meaning of both, you'd need to be fairly steeped in a world that uses those words all the time AND it is often used to identify people who "get it" from those who don't.
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Unnecessary abstractions are bad. These feel like those. Which leads you to wondering why they exist. And oftentimes it’s just like why bad developers preserve those unnecessary abstractions: job preservation.
They are in-group signifiers. And when someone uses them and doesn't understand the lingo, they are clearly an interloper. Its amazing to me that people do this for benefit but anywhere they do, you are certainly in a business or institution that is dying (perhaps slowly but still dying).
> I think, to have an in-group signalling their strategies using coded language.
Is it like when an executive or politician "retires" to spend more time with their friends & family?
it's usually coding something more precise in a sort of plausible deniability.
Yep. I'm a director now. This is exactly how it is. A big part of being effective in this role is understanding how direct you can be in a given scenario.
A senior manager on reviewing a proposal asks them to synergize with existing efforts: Your work is redundant you're wasting your time.
Option 1 is how I'd say it to a peer whose org is duplicating effort. You can give your advice, but at the end of the day: not my circus, not my clowns.
Option 2 is a more-direct way of how I'd say it to someone in my own org. I'd rephrase to: "Someone else is already doing this; focus your efforts on something more impactful."
There's CYA jargon, like layoffs, workforce rationalizations, letting someone go, challenging fiscal environment.
And there's blatant bullshit, like paradigm shift, culture building, and so on.
Two categories of execspeak.
I think those are just degree of difference in "context required to understand", not different categories.
You think so, with a term such as "culture building"?
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You're confusing bullshit with jargon, which is something they talk about in the paper. The word synergize has a bad reputation, but its mere presence in a sentence is merely a signal, it doesn't mean the sentence is bullshit.
"We will actualize a renewed level of cradle-to-grave credentialing" is an example from the article - you can't actualize a level, you can't renew a level either. And "cradle-to-grave credentialing" is at best a bad way to describe some real concept. It's word-salad from start to finish. It's not coded language, it's bullshit.