In Praise of Corporate BS

Few things unite the internet quite like mocking corporate language.

People roll their eyes at phrases like "circle back", "align on priorities", "take this offline", or "let's socialise the deck". Entire LinkedIn careers have been built on translating corporate jargon into plain English and congratulating themselves for doing so.  The assumption is that corporate language is dishonest. That it obscures meaning. That authentic people should reject it in favour of speaking exactly as they would in real life.

I have never been convinced. In fact, I think corporate language performs a valuable function. The language of work is not the language of friendship, family, or the pub.

Corporate organisations are, by definition, large organisations, and large organisations are extraordinary social experiments - thousands of people from different countries, classes, religions, generations, and political viewpoints somehow manage to collaborate towards a shared goal. It is hard enough to get a large group of people to agree on the nature and focus of their work, it is foolhardy to assume that you can get them to also agree on wider attitudes to life.

The thing that makes human collaboration possible is not authenticity. It is professionalism.  Professionalism asks us to step out of our personal identities and step into a defined role. The marketing director, the engineer, the accountant and the project manager may have wildly different views about the world, but they can still discuss a budget, a product launch, or a delivery plan because they are speaking through the lens of their role rather than their personal worldview.

Corporate BS exists for the same reason why "bring your whole self to work" is a terrible idea.  Both ideas start from the same reality: people are different. The difference is that one acknowledges the challenge and the other pretends it doesn't exist.

I have worked with people I genuinely enjoyed collaborating with. People I trusted to get the job done. People who challenged my thinking. People with whom I produced some genuinely excellent work. I'm also fairly sure that if we'd been forced to spend a weekend together, we'd have found one another incredibly irritating.

My whole self contains opinions that have nothing to do with my job. It contains frustrations, biases, views, assumptions, personal experiences and emotional baggage accumulated over a lifetime.  And so does everybody else's.  If every interaction becomes an expression of our authentic self, collaboration becomes exponentially harder. The more people insist on viewing every issue through their own experience, the more difficult it becomes to create common ground.

For the last decade or so we've been told that work should be a place where we bring our whole selves. The phrase sounds warm and human. But taken literally, it ignores and potentially undermines the single most remarkable thing about a modern global organisation. Global organisations became effective precisely because they developed mechanisms that allowed people to work around those differences. When somebody says "we need to align stakeholders", they are not usually trying to sound clever. They are using a piece of shared shorthand that allows a diverse group of people to understand what needs to happen next.

Note - If anyone who has editorialised their disdain for Corporate BS can come up with a better work than “stakeholders” to denote a diverse group of people with varying interests in an endeavour, I will immediately recant this argument.

It is 2026, so now we come to the inevitable AI-related coda.

The rise of AI has made corporate language cheaper than it has ever been. A competent language model can produce a perfectly professional email in seconds. It can thank stakeholders, align priorities, socialise recommendations and cascade next steps with superhuman efficiency.

Many people see this as proof that corporate language is worthless. I disagree. Corporate language remains valuable for all the reasons outlined above, and AI helps resolve a longstanding tension. Nobody enjoys writing in a corporate style. Crafting an update email to fifty people across different functions, markets and levels of seniority takes far longer than it should because we deliberately hold our own humanity at arm's length. We have to write carefully enough that people focus on the idea rather than our feelings about it. We want supporters to hear the argument rather than the tone. We want people who disagree to debate the substance rather than seize upon an unfortunate or divisive choice of words.

For me, AI has become an extremely useful tool for this kind of writing. Given the right context, it can quickly knock the sharp edges off my language and translate my thinking into something a broader audience can hear. The judgement is still mine. The empathy is still mine. The diplomacy is still mine. AI simply helps with the mechanics.

At the same time, we are seeing the opposite trend elsewhere. People are deliberately writing LinkedIn posts, newsletters and articles in a more informal, imperfect style. They leave in the typo, embrace awkward phrasing and avoid over-polishing their prose to signal authenticity and reassure readers that a human, rather than an AI, was responsible for the words.

Which version is more authentic?

Perhaps the real consequence of AI is that we start to return to older models of communication where it matters most. Routine information can be generated, summarised and distributed by machines. But if something is important, pick up the phone. If something is sensitive, walk over to someone's desk. If something requires trust, persuasion or genuine understanding, talk to another human being.

Machines can generate the words. We humans still have to build the shared understanding.