“It’s bullshit,” George Carlin used to say, “and it’s bad for you.”
Corporate communicators work in bullshit. And when they run out of bullshit to work in, they make more.
“Bullshit is the glue that binds us as a nation,” Carlin continued, “Where would we be without our safe, familiar American bullshit?”
I’ve been watching and writing about corporate communication for a living for 33 years. For all the technological, tactical and occasionally philosophical progress it’s made since then, corporate communication is every bit as bullshitty. Back then, my boss Larry Ragan taught his writers to make fun of executives who were always pairing “challenges and opportunities,” describing corporate things as “world class,” claiming the coal miners and oil-rig workers who toiled and sometimes died for them were their “greatest asset,” synergizing, strategizing, prioritizing and emphasizing thrilling new ideas like, The only constant is change. “Brother,” one of Larry’s columnists once delighted him by writing, “can ya paradigm?”
To his corporate communication conferences in those early 1990s, Larry invited William Lutz, editor of a newsletter called The Quarterly Review of Doublespeak, to urge communicators to stop calling layoffs “downsizing” and “rightsizing” and to stop defending people-murdering industrial disasters by saying, “Mistakes were made.” Lutz worked as a consultant for companies and the U.S. government to promote the virtues and utility of “plain language,” as he called it.
More than three decades later, Lutz is still alive—he’s now 84—but plain language is dead.
The only difference between then and now is that now we don’t even call it bullshit. We just lean in to our robust low-hanging fruit.
I won’t waste your time with any more than one term that most corporate communication people use at least once a week, and the rest of us pretend to accept, at least that often.
This one is as malevolently persistent as pre-ripped blue jeans and like them, it’s bullshit right on its face.
It’s: transparent.
No corporate executive, no management team, no institutional governance structure of any kind has ever been anything close to “transparent,” let alone “radically transparent,” as some of them claim to be. (When your window-washer does a super good job, do you describe your windows as “radically transparent”?)
Even the best-intentioned people who lead institutions do a lot of things behind closed doors: They decide who to hire and who to fire and why, who to pay how much and why. They decide which customers deserve special treatment and why, which board members should be heeded and why, which journalist should be called back and why. Because they must. Otherwise—if every internal communique had to include a cc to a New York Times reporter and Robby Starbuck—they’d be nibbled to death by ants: thousands of employees, investors, customers, community members, government regulators and random yahoos, each with their own interest, point of view and eccentric opinion.
No. Decisions are quietly, carefully come to and they’re announced with an explanation exactly as detailed and plausible-sounding as the well-intentioned leaders can muster, with an authentic-looking face.
It’s like that, and that’s the way it is—and the way it always was. You know it and I know it and we always have.
Yet we write about transparency and we read about transparency every day, knowing it’s bullshit, and knowing it’s bad for us.
“Children,” to give Carlin the last word, “should be taught to question everything they read, everything they hear.” Instead, parents “stroke the kid and the kid strokes them and we all stroke each other and they grow up all fucked up and they come to shows like this.”
And blogs like this.
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