Calling out corporate BS? There's a steaming pile to aim for
- Reference: 1774256552
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2026/03/23/corporate_bs_opinion/
- Source link:
In an inventive, incisive [1]study into the anthropology of business linguistics, researchers at that institution have proven the old adage, "bullshit baffles brains." Those most impressed by the use of corporate jargon are those least well-equipped for analytical thinking. They ranked nonsensical statements more highly when composed of the finest business bovine byproduct, as ranked on the Corporate Bullshit Receptivity Scale or CBRS. This new learning is doubly delightful, not only confirming what so many of us have noted in our own studies of management and the managed, but also inferring superior analytical awesomeness on those who instinctively loathe the stuff.
Jargon is not inherently bad. It has many essential functions, especially in tech with its vast appetite for new inventions and novel reuse of older ideas. There is no crime in using butteriness instead of low latency touch enabled graphical user interface responsiveness. Four syllables beat twenty. The use of jargon can also be a good thing in itself. When geeks first meet, their initial conversation often resembles modem talking to modem, a training and negotiation sequence when the highest level of communication is established. The use of the right jargon is a strong guide to the depth of interest in a knowledge domain, and the right use of the right jargon marks concomitant expertise.
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Management jargon misappropriates these uses, because the business of business is not technical but desperately wants to be. It is primarily people dealing with people in that wonderful game of encouraging cooperation through status, something that hasn't really changed since we picked lice off each other. But it must seem to progress, so it needs new words for old ideas. Architecting instead of designing. Drilling down instead of exploring. Granularity instead of detail. Bio-break instead of taking a leak.
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Those who use such words mark their higher status within the business environment and the superior nature of their ideas. Those who lap this up understand the dangers of over-analyzing the boss, and the importance of accepting tribal signifiers. There's a reason this stuff exists, and resists whatever criticism and mockery rightly arise. It is in the fields of academe, technology, and business journalism in which criticism and mockery blossom most brightly.
These places prioritize analytic thinking and creativity, producing output of clarity and efficiency, among people who management finds hard to control. It's not that other places lack widespread recognition of and cynicism about business jargon – these are ubiquitous – but tech and journalism are well placed to mock it publicly.
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Take bullshit bingo, the game of quietly ticking off obnoxious jargon during meetings on bingo cards. You can't actually yell "Bingo!" if you win, but the right sort of cough works just as well. This can be traced back to Turkey Bingo in colleges in the early '90s, thence to [6]Buzzword Bingo in business schools. It finally broke out under its current name and form by being hosted on the earliest web through Silicon Graphics employees. The Register knows from first-hand reports that the game quickly established itself across Silicon Valley. Intel and Microsoft employees also claimed an advanced variant where the challenge was to introduce new jargon and get it taken up by management at the meeting. Business jargon does have genuine uses after all.
[7]Age verification isn't sage verification when it's inside operating systems
[8]Protecting democracy means democratizing cybersecurity. Bring on the hackers
[9]Microsoft's Project Silica promises eternal storage. It can't get there from here
[10]Every day in every way, passwords are getting worse and worse
Despite the long tradition of business bullshit and its critics, the Cornell study comes at an apposite time. Tech and consultancy marketing has always had a peculiarly strong love for bad jargon, given the industry's habit of relaunching old ideas in new guises, and of disguising mediocre ideas in glamorous clothes. There's been more than one major new business methodology launched in a cavalcade of infographics, white papers, and shiny graphics that boils down to "have more meetings, we can show you how." Such tendencies have now been hyper-accelerated by the need to sell us all AI, and sell it hard.
The term "AI" is itself prime slime, often used as a synonym for software but never for the actual sentience it coyly implies. That over-promotion soaks all the way down with LLMs, with [11]promised efficiency benefits poisoned by the need to check it for the mistakes it continues to make. Or by the consequences of not checking for those mistakes, which happens when you believe the claims and are [12]too tired, too overworked, or too lazy to disbelieve the jargon. Forget the fog of war, it's the miasma of bullshit that needs to be dispelled.
This is where we call upon the team at Cornell to expand and extend their science beyond the general skewering of business jargon and those who create and consume it, welcome and valuable as it is. The use of the stuff as a diagnostic is great – now use that as the basis for identifying and dissecting the stuff itself, and the mechanisms by which it affects choices and actions.
The Corporate Bullshit Receptivity Scale is a great start. Now we need the ABRC, the AI Bullshit Receptivity Scale. Heroes of Cornell, you know your allies in technology and journalism are standing by to applaud and amplify your efforts. Doubtless there are entire Nobel Prize awarding committees anxiously awaiting your future endeavors here, such is their potential importance. Existential threat may be just another piece of corporate jargon, but just because something's a cliché doesn't mean it's not true. ®
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[1] https://www.theregister.com/2026/03/15/corporate_jargon_research/
[2] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_offbeat/columnists&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2acEdUZiiVs0dji7xLLFExgAAAZE&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0
[3] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_offbeat/columnists&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44acEdUZiiVs0dji7xLLFExgAAAZE&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[4] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_offbeat/columnists&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33acEdUZiiVs0dji7xLLFExgAAAZE&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[5] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_offbeat/columnists&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44acEdUZiiVs0dji7xLLFExgAAAZE&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buzzword_bingo
[7] https://www.theregister.com/2026/03/16/opinon_column_age_verification/
[8] https://www.theregister.com/2026/03/10/democratizing_security_opinion/
[9] https://www.theregister.com/2026/03/02/microsoft_project_silica_opinion/
[10] https://www.theregister.com/2026/02/23/password_opinion/
[11] https://www.theregister.com/2026/03/17/ai_businesses_faking_it_reckoning_coming_codestrap/
[12] https://www.theregister.com/2026/03/17/gartner_copilot_security_mitigations/
[13] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
We must create a supportive environment to improve the creation of bright thoughts that are appreciated by the communities of committees to better the receptivity for price award thinking.
"This can be traced back to Turkey Bingo in colleges in the early '90s"
My dad told me that they played it during lectures at Berkeley, as "buzzword bingo", in the early '50s. He was under the impression that it had come over to California from the East Coast, probably from MIT or Harvard. He was rather surprised when I came home from elementary school with mimeographed versions. The Principal at the school was curious to see if the teachers were using new terminology or not, and set us kids to work. Very early '60s in my case.
Business-speak
A couple of years back a recent business grad asked me “how are we doing?” about a task I was doing. He got torn a new one and never did it again.
We've got to downsize our sloppiness overload.
Quality stress dissipation opportunities here.
anthropology of business linguistics
The study of corporate arse licking one assumes. Adjacent to the ethology of the common brown tongue lizard (Vipera linguafuscae.)
The Augean stables of contemporary corporate management shit would defeat the ablest Heracles.
Quornell
The Cornell study fails to capture a mission-critical variable - it assumes a binary landscape consisting of two distinct cohorts: the analytically robust stakeholders who deconstruct the noise, and the low-fidelity adopters who ingest it holistically. However, there exists a third, high-value demographic: strategic practitioners who recognise the lack of substantive alignment but deploy these frameworks with full theatrical buy-in, primarily because the alternative is a deep-dive into the existential void of another quarterly planning cycle without a sustainable value proposition.
The true synergy isn't found in the jargon itself. It’s the cross-functional comedy of having three distinct species synchronised around the same boardroom table - the true believers who genuinely feel they are 'leveraging agentic AI to unlock transformative value at scale,' the self-aware performers who socialise the exact same messaging with an invisible wink, and the openly cynical who are experiencing a total system failure internally. And here is the key takeaway: from a high-level perspective, they are indistinguishable. The delivery is vertically integrated. The PowerPoint deck is 1:1. The confident head-nod when a stakeholder suggests we 'need to ideate around our AI-first strategy' - completely standardised.
This is what transforms corporate life into a richer anthropological spectacle than the Cornell team’s current roadmap accounts for. This isn't bullshit bingo - it’s bullshit poker. Every stakeholder is holding their cards, nobody has visibility on who is bluffing, and the pot continues to scale because no one wants to be the first to sunset their position and admit they have zero bandwidth for what 'orchestrating our digital twin ecosystem' actually entails in a production environment.
AI-specific nomenclature has hyper-accelerated this dynamic, given that the underlying technology remains a moving target. When a lead mentions they are 'implementing a RAG pipeline to drive enterprise knowledge synthesis,' that could scale from a sophisticated technical architecture to 'we integrated ChatGPT with a shared folder.' The ambiguity is a core feature. It allows the self-aware to pivot among the believers and vice versa, creating a linguistic herd immunity where no one is flagged for a lack of domain expertise, because actual understanding was never a KPI.
So, by all means, let’s iterate on the AI Bullshit Receptivity Scale. But ensure it accounts for the high-performing individuals who index high on receptivity not due to a lack of analytical rigour, but because they’ve strategically concluded that leaning into the narrative offers a better ROI than resistance. Some of us aren't experiencing friction with the bullshit. We are optimising it.
I don't know about Nobel prizes but something that makes you laugh and then makes you think qualifies i for an ig-Nobel.