The hidden cost of safe corporate language
The challenge with safe corporate language is that it weakens meaning. Management teams might like to use it to persuade and impress, or to inflate perceptions of their organisation, but it’s easy to spot and across a full set of corporate communications, it doesn’t work.
A 2026 study from Cornell University found that employees who are most impressed by corporate language are often the least equipped to make effective, practical decisions. It developed a “corporate bullshit generator” with statements such as “we will actualize a renewed level of cradle-to-grave credentialing”, creating “a hyper-connected, frictionless, and impact-minded global enterprise” all while “getting our friends in the tent with our best practices, we will pressure-test a renewed level of adaptive coherence”.
Ouch. Any of these sound familiar? And why do companies insist on talking like this?
Maybe your colleague has just come off a leadership course. Perhaps you’re looking at ways to avoid risk, satisfy multiple stakeholders and ensure that nothing is challenged too directly.
Corporate speak is safe. It’s familiar. We get that.
But it’s also inauthentic. And in these AI-driven days, authenticity is really important if a company wants to really engage audiences. Lack of authenticity reduces trust.
We often see initial authentic messaging that becomes more diluted as more voices are added - generally from stakeholders whose day job is to be an expert in something that definitely isn’t comms. Statements become broader and less specific, documents begin to say similar things in slightly different ways, and language is softened to accommodate competing viewpoints.
So we know that corporate speak is often vague and unclear, and that clear communication leads to better business outcomes. It’s time to cut the jargon
Top 7 corporate speak examples we keep seeing:
Leverage
Solution
Strawman
Deep dive
Ideate
Synergy
Wheelhouse