Does Corporate Gibberish Mean Anything?

By Victor Adams

I almost started a corporate gibberish slogan once. I was at a conference where some speaker was sloganeering us to death. A colleague next to me turned and said, “I bet we could get the phrase ‘sprinkle the infield’ going”. I couldn’t stop laughing. Then I couldn’t stop thinking…is that how all this nonsense gets started? As a joke?

Would you believe that there is even a parody website for creating corporate gibberish? Check out www.andrewdavidson.com/gibberish/. Insert any company name, and you’ll probably be staring at next week’s corporate morale memo or rebranding initiative.

Do you remember the phrase perception is reality? Before all the cool kids started ending sentences with right, they said perception is reality (PIR). They said it a lot. Right is a new version of PIR, which itself was just a newer version of image is everything. Does pointless corporate gibberish mean anything, or is it just high-school cool-girls redux?

On its face, perception is reality is a meaningless phrase. As my brother often says, that logic implies that the moon actually is made of cheese. Taking it further, railroad tracks don’t actually get closer together as they approach the horizon…it just appears that way. In the 90s we suffered through “image is everything”. A campaign so morally bankrupt it led spokesman Andre Agassi to blame his belief in it for his career’s demise. As Agassi found out, looking like you are good at something isn’t the same as actually being good at it.

I promise, if you repeat mindless corporate drivel, actual smart people will view you as less intelligent. Why? Because they know that even if I drive a BMW and wear expensive suits, I might still dismember kittens and sew their tails onto dogs. That would make me Dr. Moreau caliber crazy, regardless of how I’m perceived. Remember the Jerry Sandusky or the Bernie Madoff scandals? Everyone perceived them as leaders in their fields. How did that work out?

Corporate leaders spout this nonsense because they’re unimpressive, un-original, or lack the willpower to use real words to describe things. This leads us to right, the new PIR. Whereas nonsense words like ideation or critical are designed to prove your MBA wasn’t a waste of money, right is actually a 1-word slogan. The theory is to get “buy-in” for your previous sentence, establish it as a fact, and get your listener nodding so they’ll agree with you whether you’re right or not. So, we’re back to perception again: don’t be right, seem right.

How about you just believe in good ideas and learn to articulate them. Then people will agree with you and you won’t irritate them by saying right a hundred times. Just like PIR and image is everything, smart people are smart enough to agree with one sentence and still disagree with another, even if they nod when you said right.

It’s as pointless as people sprinkling the infield with the word literally to intensify a point. You weren’t literally cutting the grass. You were cutting the grass. You don’t need to add literally. When you do, should I to assume every sentence without the word literally is, literally, an exaggeration?

In the end, just because people think you’re wonderful, doesn’t make you wonderful. You do actually have to be wonderful. That’s the problem with corporate gibberish. It’s a mask to hide the fact that some people may have a low wonderfulness quotient, but they’re still part of the cool crowd.

So be countercultural. Use plain English. You may not sound like you went to an Ivy League school, but at least people will understand you.

Got some corporate gibberish you want me to lampoon in my next book? Tweet it at me, @write_vicadams. I’m always on the lookout to make the overly serious look foolish.

Victor Adams, author of the satirical novel, The Last One Out, is a former top-10 franchisee and independent business owner. He sold his US businesses and retired to Cartagena, Colombia in his early 40s.

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