Why the Best Strategies Often Sound Too Simple

by | 24 Mar, 2026 | Narratives & Meanings

Apparently a new Cornell University study has found that workers who use / fall for corporate bullshit are worse at their jobs…

This brought back fond memories of the Bullshit Bingo tracker we used to keep to try and steer clients (and ourselves) away from jargon when working on B2B projects back in my Group SJR days…

Simple, jargon-free language is almost always the best option if you want your message to be understood – but it can be hard to get it past approvers, because the more you simplify the language, the clearer the strategic recommendations become.

For some, this clarity feels like a risk – because the best strategies tend to be very simple, once you strip them of all the linguistic fluff. This is where and why business bullshit creeps in – to make the clear seem complicated, so the person presenting seems like they’re better value for money.

Of course, what this all misses is that devising the strategy *is* the easy bit (relatively). The hard part is getting others on board to start rolling it out, and to ensure the organisation as a whole doesn’t just adopt it as a mantra, but understands and acts on it.

This is why strategic development needs to take its time – the conversations and debates that inform a strategy are the first step towards helping the broader organisation accept it.

Put lots of jargon in your explanations, you’re creating barriers to understanding and adoption.

But equally. there’s always a risk that someone will call you on it – and reveal that underneath all the convoluted wording, you’re really not saying much of substance. That’s surely a far bigger reputational risk than showing you have the insight to cut through to the heart of the matter with a clear, simple strategic recommendation.

The endless battle against “garbage language”

by | 22 Feb, 2020 | Marginalia

Complaining about nonsense business-speak may be futile, but this piece – a review of a memoir about life in startup land – does a good job of summing up why spewing out business bullshit is not just intellectually offensive, but actively harmful:

“I like Anna Wiener’s term for this kind of talk: garbage language. It’s more descriptive than corporate speak or buzzwords or jargon. Corporatespeak is dated; buzzword is autological, since it is arguably an example of what it describes; and jargon conflates stupid usages with specialist languages that are actually purposeful, like those of law or science or medicine. Wiener’s garbage language works because garbage is what we produce mindlessly in the course of our days and because it smells horrible and looks ugly…

“But unlike garbage, which we contain in wastebaskets and landfills, the hideous nature of these words — their facility to warp and impede communication — is also their purpose. Garbage language permeates the ways we think of our jobs and shapes our identities as workers. It is obvious that the point is concealment; it is less obvious what so many of us are trying to hide.”

In short, if your ideas are good, don’t bury them in garbage. If they’re not, the presence of garbage is a good indicator.