Why do managers sound like that?

Jargon, bullshit, and puff … or is it?

Coming out of a big company meeting, you might wonder what it means for your team’s regular work. You all joined the all-hands or town hall. You saw some financial charts, heard some positive words. But you’re not sure how to connect those words with the things your team is focused on.

Most of your team do care what senior managers say. Is the business doing OK? What can your team do to help it more? Is there a good plan? Are changes on the way? Do the management understand the value of what the team does? Do the management understand their challenges?

But it can be hard for your team to find out the answers, because the language of senior managers is so different from everyday work. Everyday work is easier — things are generally right or wrong, true or false. But in management-land, nothing seems so clear. 

Sometimes your team may think it’s a bunch of bullshit: If the words sound strange or fake, maybe the thoughts behind them are fake too?

You’re in an awkward position. As a team leader or manager, you do know what it’s like to do the actual work, to make the things that others need to drive the business. But you also realize that you can’t know all the details any more. And you see that your managers are further from those details still, and closer to other bits of the business — the finances, the organization structure, and the ways that the organization promotes itself.

You already know it’s not easy being a manager. But still — why do they talk like that?

Here’s an example. It’s not from an all-hands meeting, but from a presentation that was written in a similar style.

Maybe you’ve heard of WeWork, the co-working space provider. In 2021, WeWork was trying to turn around its fortunes. It had let go of its founder (Adam Neumann, the “Billion Dollar Loser” described in a bestseller business book of that name!)

WeWork now had a new CEO, who had helped to rescue a failing real estate company before. The management team presented to an audience of investors a slide deck to build confidence.

On a slide titled “WeWork’s platform opportunity”, the subtitle predicted that:

Scale meaning that the company was big; innovation meaning that it did new things that competitors weren’t doing.

What were those innovative things? Under a heading “Digitization of real estate”, was this statement:

If you were a developer for WeWork, what would you think of language like this? Presumably you would see this slide in an all-hands update. What would it mean to you?

Shorthand or fluff?

I guess you know that “high margin” just describes something that brings in a lot of money compared to the money spent making it. Restaurants are low-margin business (they pay a lot of rent, wages, and food bills compared with the money they get back). Fizzy drinks are higher margin. Software should be higher still: make it once and you can sell it many times.

“Value add” means when a product or service has had something added beyond just the raw materials; something added so that the supplier can charge more for the product. The raw material that WeWork dealt in was office space. To add value might be to put in a coffee machine or pool table. (To not add value would be to simply provide a bare office space: chairs, desks, Wi-Fi.)

“High margin” and “value add” are specialized terms that save time once you know them. We can call them jargon, but it’s useful. Finance has a lot of words like that. Another one is EBITDA, one measure of a company’s health. It stands for “earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization”. Imagine having to say that whole phrase every time you were looking at a number.

Actually, every work area has its own concepts, and convenient language to label them. There is a term “CES” used by people who measure how happy customers are. It means “Customer Effort Score”. It needs a little unpacking: a high customer effort score is good! It doesn’t mean that customers are having to work too hard to use your products. CES is measured backwards, because managers like numbers that go up over time. This concept, and the knowledge of how to measure customer effort, are all packaged up in that one word: “CES”.

So jargon saves time, by grouping complex ideas under a simple label.

Is “value add” a fair term to describe the WeWork Marketplace? According to the slides, customers could use the Marketplace to easily buy IT infrastructure, HR support (like salary admin), and space for company events. By supplying these services, WeWork’s customers wouldn’t have to spend extra effort on them, and should be willing to pay decent money for the convenience. So yes, “value add” is a fair term to use here.

Also fair in the context of the WeWork deck is the term “platform”. Sometimes business bullshitters misuse it to describe any product that can be customized. Here, though, the WeWork management used it to mean that they would charge other property owners to rent space to companies using WeWork’s software and processes. (That might sound odd, because it could strengthen competing companies. But it isn’t unusual for a big company with mature processes to license them in this way. For an example, you could read about the various activities of the Ocado group.)

The downside of jargon is when, in packaging concepts, it makes them seem overly tidy or distant, like looking at a busy scene from above. The reality of the WeWork Marketplace may have been messier than it sounds.

The provider for the HR services had worked with WeWork for a couple of years by that time. But from around the time of the presentation onwards, there isn’t much news about that partnership. And regarding the other services, the current Marketplace offering doesn’t mention events or server rackspace, though there are packages of printer credits and an option to “Request consultation” if you want a quote for storing your bike. Things seem more humble than they sounded in the deck’s version of the Marketplace — a bit less “value added” and perhaps a lower margin.

But these are small things. The bigger picture is that WeWork really struggled in the years following that presentation. The company filed for bankruptcy, and sold many properties. It went through a number of CEOs in a short time. It is now privately owned, and doing better. But it isn’t worth anything like its supposed value under Adam Neumann.

Of course that makes us look at the presentation deck differently. What did the management know when they prepared those slides? Did they use jargon to avoid uncomfortable truths? Did they care more about truth or about giving a good impression?

Bullshit or hope?

There is a fertile academic field of research into “bulllshit”. For some academics, bullshitting isn’t lying; it’s worse. At least liars care enough about the truth to carefully avoid it. Bullshitters aren’t bothered by the truth at all. They are more concerned with the impression their words leave than whether those words happen to be true or not.

But truth is a thing that really matters in an investor presentation by a publicly-owned company. False statements mean big trouble. In any case, the turnaround management team felt they had to rebuild trust, given the recent past. They had a strong motivation to follow the truth.

And they didn’t need to make things up. What they said in the deck made sense. The underlying argument was this:

1. Organizations really valued flexible workspace arrangements (especially as COVID was still having a big effect on work patterns at that point).

2. WeWork was big enough, and owned enough property, to be able to offer flexible workspaces without the risks that a smaller provider would incur.

3. Smaller providers (such as individual landlords) would pay WeWork for the opportunity to use their platform. They would do this to avoid having to create their own processes (which is risky) and to dedicate staff to those processes.

4. Along with flexible workspace, companies would value other reduced responsibilities, for example through outsourcing payroll and some legal aspects of HR.

5. The money from the core business of renting workspace, as well as renting the platform and offering “value-add services”, would be enough to keep WeWork healthily growing.

This argument is fair. Perhaps the risks to WeWork were also obvious to the management, but the argument seems no worse than many strategic bets made by many companies. There are no giant leaps of faith. The deck is not bullshit — it is more like optimism.

And all business needs optimism. Everyone who started any business needs it. You look at something people need, and think “I could do something about that”. Of course you look at the risks, and try to mitigate them. But your stance is optimistic, because “I can’t do anything about that” is not a way to grow or achieve anything.

You don’t need to be an entrepreneur to appreciate that. If you were a developer for WeWork at the time, wouldn’t you be looking to the management to present a solid but optimistic view to investors? Would you want them to paint a depressing picture and discourage investment?

If managers depressed everyone, it’s hard to see how organizations would get much work done, or have much chance of success. And senior managers’ main job is to look ahead in time. By definition, plans aren’t guaranteed.

When it comes to planning, and high-level statements, and even bullshit, there is probably a spectrum. On one end is when you don’t really talk about plans at all, but only current facts. You can talk at some detail, because the details are known. The everyday work of your team may be like this.

At the other end of the spectrum is when someone really is making stuff up without caring too much about its truth. Some politicians do that, and perhaps a few business leaders. I only ever knew one senior leader like that.

In the middle is a zone of educated guessing and direction-setting. It’s where you and your bosses stay most of the time. They’re perhaps a little further along in “future planning” and high-level directions than you. And a little further from the details of how to get stuff done.

In that zone, you have to assume that some details will become clear in time. In setting directions, you have to be general. And you may be a little hopeful at times.

But you do care that the directions you set are the right ones, and that they will take your team and you to a good place. Reality is what you are still working with; it’s not an inconvenience. You and your bosses aren’t bullshitting, just feeling your way through a complex landscape, filling in some gaps as you go!

Language to get stuff done

Organizations are complex. Part of the truth about an organization is financial numbers, or organizational charts. Another aspect of the truth is the way that the people in those charts do their work, and the way that work helps customers and gains new ones. Managers are not managing well if they know all the details, all the time.

As a team lead or manager yourself, you often need to translate the senior management plans into something that your team can work with. For sure, some plans are easier than others to work with. Some come with good examples of how to use them. Those plans often come from managers who have kept in touch with customers and people doing the work.

Either way we need to figure out what the real priorities are, check them with our bosses, and then work with our team on achieving them. (Does this sound like abstract fluff? Get some practical examples and tips in this post: Nice Managers Force Priorities.)

It shouldn’t be a one-way transmission from on high, either. When plans might seem vague, or a bit too optimistic, it’s our job to talk with our own bosses and figure out how to make things work — how to make those high-level ideas real enough to act on. Sometimes our bosses need to change the plans a bit to accommodate things they didn’t know, or had underestimated. But also, sometimes team leaders or junior managers or middle managers need a push from senior management — something that stretches us a little.

All of this is done in language that might sound a bit fake to non-managers. But if you use it with the goal of describing true things, it’s as good as any other language.