Picture your last all-hands. Someone said, “Let’s pressure-test our go-to-market thesis.” Another person promised to “leverage cross-functional synergies.” A third is committed to “driving stakeholder-centric value creation at scale.” Everyone nodded. Nobody asked what any of it meant. And somewhere in that room, your smartest employees quietly disengaged.
This isn’t a minor aesthetic problem. New research from Cornell University cognitive psychologist Shane Littrell, published in Personality and Individual Differences, puts hard data behind something many founders sense but rarely confront: corporate jargon doesn’t just waste time. It actively degrades the cognitive performance of the teams exposed to it.
For entrepreneurs trying to build lean, high-output organizations, that finding should be genuinely alarming.
What the research actually found
Littrell built a “corporate bullshit generator,” his term, not ours, capable of producing grammatically convincing, professionally plausible, and completely meaningless phrases. He then asked hundreds of office workers to rate how insightful those fabricated statements sounded. The scores became a Corporate Bullshit Receptivity Scale, measuring how susceptible each person was to mistaking confident language for substantive thinking.
“We will actualize a renewed level of cradle-to-grave credentialing.””—A real output from Littrell’s generator. Real employees rated it “insightful.”
When he cross-referenced receptivity scores with cognitive testing, the pattern was clear and consistent. Workers who rated the nonsense highly also scored lower on analytic thinking, cognitive reflection, and fluid intelligence. They were more likely to describe managers who spoke in abstractions as visionary leaders, whether or not those managers had delivered a single concrete result.
The employees most culturally rewarded for being “team players,” nodding along, staying positive, and speaking the shared language were also the ones whose thinking suffered most for it.
“Rather than a rising tide lifting all boats, a higher level of corporate BS acts more like a clogged toilet of inefficiency.”
— Shane Littrell, Cornell University
Why this hits Startups and Scale-ups hardest
Big corporations have layers of bureaucracy that can absorb waste. Startups don’t. When you’re running a 12-person team trying to hit a Series A milestone, every hour of meetings spent circling abstraction instead of addressing reality is a compounding cost you cannot afford.
Worse, the jargon problem tends to accelerate as companies grow. Early-stage teams communicate with brutal directness because they have to; there’s no room for anything else. Then funding arrives. Headcount scales. Slide decks are starting to go out to investors and new hires. Somewhere in that process, many founders unknowingly start importing the very communication culture they built their companies to escape.
Littrell points to several organizational conditions that breed the problem: euphemistic performance feedback, group meetings that reward confident ignorance, mission statements engineered to sound virtuous rather than say anything specific, and a general institutional pressure to project confidence at all costs. Sound familiar? These are the default features of almost every startup that survives past its seed round.
The Feedback Loop you can’t afford to Ignore
Here is the mechanism that makes this genuinely dangerous at the leadership level. Employees who are primed to respond positively to impressive-sounding abstraction will rate the managers who produce it more favorably. Those managers get promoted. Emboldened, they produce more of the same. The culture self-selects for it.
Over time, an organization’s internal promotion signals get decoupled from performance signals. The people who rise aren’t necessarily the people who execute; they’re the people who communicate in ways the culture has been trained to reward. If that culture rewards jargon, you end up with a leadership bench full of people who are very good at sounding strategic and less practiced at being strategic.
For a founder still in the building, this is the most expensive version of the problem. You may not notice it until you’re looking at a quarter that should have been stronger, wondering why the execution didn’t match the planning.
The three questions every Founder should steal
Littrell’s practical prescription is simple: when you encounter any organizational messaging, a pitch deck, a strategy memo, or a leadership update, slow down and ask three things.
The Clarity Test Applies to Every Internal Document
• What, exactly, is the claim being made here?
• Does it make a specific, falsifiable prediction, or does it just sound like one?
• If I stripped out every word of three syllables or more, what’s left?
The third question is the most useful one in practice. Jargon is often structural; it fills space where specific thinking hasn’t happened yet. When you remove it, you either find the concrete idea underneath or you find nothing. Both outcomes are useful pieces of information.
As a founder, you also set the cultural permission level for this kind of scrutiny. If you ask, “What does that actually mean?” in a meeting once, it’s a question. If you ask it consistently, it becomes an expectation. That expectation, over time, is how you build an organization where language tracks reality instead of drifting away from it.
One thing no one wants to Admit
Littrell’s most uncomfortable finding is that nearly everyone believes they’re immune. Research on susceptibility to misleading language, from advertising to misinformation, consistently shows that people dramatically overestimate their own critical clarity. We identify the person next to us as the one who got taken in. We assume we were the ones rolling our eyes.
The honest version of this insight, for founders especially, is that the conditions most likely to erode clear thinking are the ordinary conditions of building a company: exhaustion, social pressure, the desire to move fast, and the temptation to reward people who project confidence rather than those who express uncertainty well. You are not immune. Neither is your team. That’s why the fix has to be structural, not personal.
Build a culture where plain speech is the norm. Reward the person who says, “I don’t know yet; here’s what we’d need to find out,” over the one who delivers a fluent non-answer. Make it safe to ask what something means. Treat vague language as a first draft, not a final one.
The companies that do this consistently don’t just communicate better. They think better. And in a market where every point of execution edge compounds, that gap closes deals that jargon-soaked competitors miss entirely.
