We need to wage a war against business drivel and corporate guff, says RUTH SUNDERLAND

There is never a shortage of corporate drivel. Although there is no reliable index measuring the volume (perhaps someone should invent one, though on second thoughts, how depressing), it’s clear to everyone in business that drivel-flation is rampant.

You only have to spend a few minutes on LinkedIn to see it in abundance. The topic is an apt sequel to last week’s column on corporate guff: The two are closely related.

The need to produce reams of information, much of it useless, gives rise to the verbiage.

English is not the first language for a fair few of the chief executives in the FTSE 100, but whatever their native tongue, most of them have adopted the same weird dialect.

They risk alienating customers, shareholders, politicians and anyone else listening.

Consider the response from Unilever’s boss, Fernando Fernandez, to a question at a conference on the craze under previous management for trying to be woke.

Investors, including fund manager Terry Smith, chief executive at Fundsmith, accused the consumer goods giant of ‘losing the plot’ by, among other things, searching for the deeper purpose of Hellmann’s mayonnaise.

Fernandez – who is pushing through a controversial £49.2bn deal to sell Unilever’s food division to American spice and sauce maker McCormick – responded to the inquiry by saying he is obsessed with ‘consumer preference drivers in every category’.

Keep it simple: There is far too much business waffle – talking and writing in jargon is contagious

He added that he will ‘never support principles in our brand that are not anchored in consumer needs’. 

What he could have said was simply that Unilever will concentrate on giving customers what they want.

Talking and writing in jargon is contagious. People do it to signal their membership of an elite business club and to exclude outsiders.

They do it to sanitise harsh messages, which usually involve plans to sack people.

Bosses need to resist corporate patter

Bill Winters, chief executive of Standard Chartered Bank, no doubt rues his recent choice of words when he talked about replacing ‘lower-value human capital’ with AI.

The effect, as in his case, is to make the chief executives in question sound more callous than perhaps they are.

The growth of AI will make matters worse. It brings its own argot: A fork in this context is nothing to do with cutlery and GitHub is not a room full of irascible old men.

Generative AI is expressly designed to create an air of competence with no substance behind it.

This – pouring out words to present a veneer of expertise – is exactly what humans do when they slip into corporate patter. Chief executives need to resist.

Hopeful signs on this score can be detected at BP, of all places, in the direct tone taken under Meg O’Neill.

The ousting of chairman Albert Manifold was a dog’s dinner, but at least the oil giant did not resort to platitudes, saying plainly it had ‘removed’ him.

O’Neill’s straightforward language goes along with a mission to simplify the complicated business into two divisions, upstream and downstream.

Let’s hope the outbreak of linguistic clarity at BP is a good omen, though with such an accident-prone boardroom one can never be too sure.

The role model to follow is Lord Wolfson of Next, who is famed in the City for his lucidity. His annual reports are exemplary and it is no coincidence Next has continued to perform well when many other retailers have floundered.

When machines can churn out polished nonsense by the bucketload, bosses who tell a clear and compelling story will be the winners.