Corporate BS

I received an email today which began as follows:

‘Dear X,

Adaptability and stability are essential in aviation, ensuring systems evolve seamlessly while maintaining operational excellence in a dynamic environment.’

I couldn’t disagree with much in that statement. Adaptability, stability, seamless evolution, operational excellence and dynamism are all laudable values for sure. But I resented the lumpy word-soup they formed together, like a child mixing ice-cream, baked beans, pasta and ketchup in a vat because they are all her favourite foods. A sentence is not always more than the sum of its parts – sometimes it barely holds together, as each word or phrase pulls from a different world.

In the email I received today, there is a discordant blend of technological and organic language (systems and operational excellence vs adaptability and evolution), but by the time most words make their way to a corporate mailing list, they are usually pushed to the brink of death. Pick a famous business and head to its Values page online, do that four or five times over, and you will realise we have exhausted individuality and meaningful language in the corporate world. Start-ups and small businesses may still prize differentiation, but most long-standing businesses cement themselves in a concrete castle of corporate BS.

Apple is one of the more tragic examples, because it really was innovative once upon a time.  See here Apple’s values c.1981.

Now Apple is the largest company in the world, thanks to those original values enshrined by Steve Jobs, they have quietly erased the quirky, ambitious, and human values in favour of the following:

This only marks a wider trend towards cloyingly anodyne language of which ChatGPT is a result, not a cause. As a Large Language Model, it simply averages out our language. By synthesising the sum of corporate BS on the web, it has nailed the genre (not that it took much skill) and pulled language on social media, blogs and copywriting up or down to the average. In turn, this means even more average content on the web until we arrive at an equilibrium where we are unable to read, write or think outside this cocoon of averageness.

In this world, we can receive an email opening with the sentence:

‘Adaptability and stability are essential in aviation, ensuring systems evolve seamlessly while maintaining operational excellence in a dynamic environment.’

And not bat an eyelid.

But I want to resist this world and reclaim meaningful, messy language, which is another reason why it’s important to produce something average. It is our average, not the aggregate of humanity’s. In time, we push on and attempt new, tying a thousand strands together to develop an inimitable style, through imitating a thousand people better than ourselves. In time, our average will produce excellence.

Please press on and continue writing shoddily, because anything is better than the narcosis of corporate BS nowadays.