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It's popular because it doesn't ruffle any feathers.

I heard somewhere at some point that for organisational values to be useful, they need to provide guidance in making decisions. They need to be trade-offs. They need to reject something in favour of something else.

So, rephrasing your bullshit bingo:

"We are now pursuing a cultural shift: we will value good attitudes and difference of opinion over efficiency. We will start to ignore some of our personal goals and instead emphasise the goals we have in common."

This is actionable. It can be used to choose a path to proceed when efficiency is pitted against diversity. It actually says something.

And yeah, it's going to suck if you don't agree. Better that than meaningless drivel.

> I heard somewhere at some point that for organisational values to be useful, they need to provide guidance in making decisions. They need to be trade-offs. They need to reject something in favour of something else.

I think you really hit the nail on the head with this one, and it's why bullshit corporate value statements proliferate with ease: they can give the appearance of action without actually requiring any hard decisions.

If a company decides to spend times on these "values" exercises, I think it's important to phrase it in what the company won't do. I.e., if a potential client is offering a million dollar contract, but requires constraints X, Y and Z, which constraints would require the company say "No, we won't do this deal, even if it means we'd lose a million bucks in revenue".

Also, the other reason I get very jaded about "corporate values", is that it's easy to say that you have all these nice, progressive values, but when the shit hits the fan and the company is under duress, I've found those values usually go out the window, replaced by the only true value, which is "make money".

How is that actionable? Who defines what “good attitudes” and “the goals we have in common” is? Also “difference of opinion over efficiency” seems to indicate that it is better not to make progress, and be outcompeted by the competition, than to value one opinion over another. In other words, eventually the company will fail and everybody loose their jobs. People disagree all the time. You need a mechanism to pick one opinion over another to make progress.

Faced with two proposals for how to proceed on an issue, people very often agree on which proposal is the one indicative of "better attitude but less efficient" and which is "more brusque but also more efficient".

In other words, the disagreement is not about the characteristics of the approaches -- it's which characteristic to prioritise. Good values help with that.

Again not my experience at all. And the moment you bring religion, philosophy, history, culture, resource scarcity etc. into the equation things get really difficult. Sometimes impossible to resolve. Which is why war and violence is still with us today.

> Practically speaking my colleagues are all very smart (academics, PhDs all over the place) and should be able to detect bullshit bingo.

Who says they didn’t detect it? Welcoming, diversity, strategic, collaboration - these are religious tenets that are not allowed to be questioned in any professional context. Much more likely to have been an “emperor has no clothes” situation.

"Weird Al" Yankovic - Mission Statement https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GyV_UG60dD4

As a long time fan of Weird Al, I've always been impressed with his knowledge of culture specifically outside his own domain. Making satire of Prince & Eminem is straightforward, they are basically his peers.

What I'm impressed with is how does he get the insight into things like corporate America? Other songs like "It's all about the Pentiums" are satire, but they are accurate satire of a very early, nascent culture. It's rare that an entertainer can gain so much insight into things outside their own field.

I loved this! And the fact that I was parsing its lyrics for meaning suggests I’ve become too immersed in the culture for my own good

"Paradigm shift" cracked me up!

Let me tell you a secret: nobody cares. Except maybe the people who need to invent this stuff. Everybody else, including the ones who put the mission statement on the letterhead etc., just learned to ignore it. It's just like "How are you?" without really asking about your well-being. It's a kind of ritual. These words are basically empty, but have a function. However, the function is not so much in the meaning as in form. Nowadays you can't have a company without a mission statement, corporate values and so on. The point is, most values are the same. You don't have that much choice, you have to "embrace diversity" and so on no matter what you actually think. All companies do the same, and going in the opposite direction would be insane - you would simply lose customers.

> "Further establishing a welcoming and diverse work environment encouraging synergy and collaboration by committing to a common set of strategic goals."

That certainly is buzzword soup. But I don't think its fully incoherent or bullshit. It essentially says:

Lets continue becoming more diverse. Because doing that will help us work together better and more. We will do this by all agreeing on what our goals are and agreeing that we will follow them.

The core concept is not that bullshitty. Though how exactly agreement on the goals leads to more diversity isn't quite clear. If the workshop were to be about figuring out if / how agreement on goals leads to more diversity in your specific company, then your buzzword soup happened to deliver an accidentally useful discussion.

> Lets continue becoming more diverse

Problem is that diverse doesn't really say anything, it is just a positive word. Diversity is often a bad thing, you don't want to have to build a diverse set of services for one functionality etc. Diversifying your income streams is good, but also not good since it dilutes efforts, you know there is also the "focus on your core business" mantra that goes the exact opposite.

Edit: For example, can you explain what "diverse work environment" means? Do they have no desk standards so that desks don't fit neatly together? Do they lack AC so that you get a diverse temperature over the year? Inclusive work environment would have said more, but diverse? Whatever positive meaning you attribute to it comes from your own imagination, that is the main selling point of these slogans. You don't promise anything but people still feel you said something good.

In a lot of social circles, the word "diverse" has undergone significant semantic narrowing. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/01/opinion/language-race-sem... is a decent discussion of the phenomenon.

It does mean the word means totally different things to different people. That may make it a good or bad word to use in a mission statement, depending on your goals.

> Because doing that will help us work together better and more

Not my experience at all. The more diverse, the harder it is to communicate, share values, and achieve goals. We are all products of our cultures. And some cultures are fundamentally incompatible.

Also, it is impossible for everybody to agree on the same goals. Without some sort of social/hidden pressure to comply with the dominant opinions, clearly signalled by who gets promoted/fired by the company.

In other words, I call it for what it is: BS.

You might disagree with the premise. But the statement is meaningful, interpretable, and testable. I don't think that qualifies as "bullshitting" because there is clarity.

I could imagine the content of workshop involving bullshitting. (Regardless of whether diversity is positive) but I don't think the title counts as bullshit.

As for me having a blindspot, I hope you see I wasn't arguing about diversity at all.

But it is bullshit - it just says, "let us do the things that work well, and not do the things that do not work well". It's not wrong, but it doesn't need to be said, either. Of course he was trying to be ridiculous, but it sounds like every other corporate mission statement.

No, it is much more specific.

It identifies a specific goal, a reason to reach that goal, and a way to attain that goal.

The idea could actually be wrong. Whilst "do things that work well" is a tautological statement.

It actually is pretty "bullshitty". Diversity is just cultural zeitgeist that companies parrot to please demographics they want to hire. It's the definition of Mammon.

> Lets continue becoming more diverse. Because doing that will help us work together better and more.

This is a tautology.

I suspect you have a blindspot here, because this specific brand of bullshit is there to please people with your belief system. To others, it's as much bullshit as a company prayer, or talk of how a SAAS startup is "changing the world", would be.

That is not a tautology at all. It is closer to a contradiction.

My point wasn't that I agree with the statement. My point is that the statement has clarity, and that it actually communicates an idea.

The very fact that the statement could be falsified means to me that it is not bullshit as meant in the article. That is not to say the statement is true!

> That is not a tautology at all. It is closer to a contradiction.

I actually meant a non sequitur, but can't edit at this point.

> My point wasn't that I agree with the statement. My point is that the statement has clarity, and that it actually communicates an idea.

> The very fact that the statement could be falsified means to me that it is not bullshit as meant in the article. That is not to say the statement is true!

Yes, this is fair. I misunderstood the point you were trying to make. My apology!

Check out the Weird AL song "Mission Statement". It's exactly this.

https://youtu.be/GyV_UG60dD4

Besides the emperor has no clothes possibility, are you certain that a lot of people are just not in the joke and don't want to rock it?

are you certain you read my comment to the end?

You stated that nobody realized the sarcasm, but you didn't state how you know that. The GP is basically asking how you knew nobody got the sarcasm. The GP is implying it's possible that one or more people understood you, loved it, and didn't want to spoil the sarcasm fun by mentioning it, and instead feigned enthusiasm. The GP is implying it's possible someone added their own sarcasm on top of yours, but maybe you missed their sarcasm.

The GP wants more details about how you know this wasn't the case. Your post lacks sufficient detail to determine how you arrived at the conclusion that nobody noticed your sarcasm. Without reading their minds, you couldn't know for certain, and the GP wants more details about your reasoning process.

no, I didn't. I stated that maybe they (employees in general) knowingly go along with it for financial reasons.

Then I misunderstood "That statement was unanimously received very well and nobody realized that this is basically just sarcasm in action." and I believe the GGGP had a similar understanding to me.

well, yes - let's say I kept thinking _while_ writing. I started out with that sentiment then I questioned it ;)

Is "boni" a shortened version of "bonification"?

I understood there were career gains in falling for the bullshit, but it wasn't clear it was very direct.