We all know that people talking out their ass about things they know nothing about is a remarkably common phenomenon. From politics to the workplace to people on social media, we consistently observe amazing amounts of bullshit being used to clamour for status. While this is obviously a very bad thing, the fact that it's bad and the reasons why it's bad have been talked half to death already. The logic of why people do it has also been quite thoroughly explored, and we understand, at least on a superficial level, why people might initially be taken in by bullshit.
What I'm interested in here is primarily the question of why this works. After all, despite all the shit we give them, executives aren't usually stupid. Even with lots of privilege and nepotism in the mix, an executive has to be smart enough to play the political game that they're embedded in and to figure out how to act in their own best interests. I'll not say that your average executive is brilliant, exactly, but they are likely to be significantly smarter in the aggregate than the population average. So why are they falling for this shit?
Moreover, once people fall for bullshit, why does it spiral out of control in the way that we observe? After all, people make dumb mistakes all the time, and it doesn't usually spread out of control in such a way. People eventually develop a resistance to stupid, and even very dim people will eventually learn that certain courses of action lead to pain. Why are people not developing a resistance to bullshit artists?
Emotive strategy
Those of you who've known me for a while will know that I have a deep and abiding love for the military theorist Carl von Clausewitz (drink!). Writing in the mid-nineteenth century, his book On War is an excellent resource for understanding modern militaries and strategic thinking more generally. I highly recommend the book itself, but if you want to read something a bit more accessible, Bret Devereaux over at ACOUP sets out a lot of the ideas in his articles about the Siege of Gondor and the Battle of Helm's Deep (Devereax's blog is, by-the-by, entirely excellent and you should definitely go read it). Strategy, in Clausewitz's view, is the wide-scale view in which you determine what your objectives (and those of your organisation) are, and what approaches you're going to use to achieve them.
Strategy, as opposed to operations or tactics, belongs in the hands of the state: in the business world, this usually means the executive team. The strategic goals for any business or organisation are usually a) survival followed by b) earning as much money as possible (this one has multiple potential definitions: more on this later). Businesses and organisations can have practical or ideological projects beyond this, and obviously for NGOs and similar organisations they're kind of expected, but the two strategic goals listed above are almost universally shared by any organised group of people working in the economy (this excludes the military, as while they are a part of the economy, their main focus is on direct interstate conflict, which sits at least partially outside the realm of economics). A strategy, then, is a plan for achieving these strategic objectives with the resources one has available to them, in the context of the space in which the organisation sits.
In this context, a glaring vulnerability becomes obvious: the majority of business leaders don't have a strategy. That is to say, they have no plan for how to use their company's resources and interact with their environment so as to meet their strategic objectives. The vast majority of what we call "business strategy" falls under tactics or operations in Clausewitz's framework, and oftentimes, very little thought is actually given to how a company's resources translate into survival and revenue. In this kind of situation, all kinds of issues start to arise.
The issue most relevant to this discussion is what we might call emotive strategy: leaders choose what to do based almost entirely on what feels good in the moment. Elon Musk is an excellent example of what happens when this is taken to extremes: you end up buying Twitter, making yourself a laughing stock in front of the world and then sliding inexorably towards being a fascist. Unfortunately, it's not always that obvious.
Return to Office mandates are an excellent example of a more common emotive strategy. Evidence on productivity with regards to working remotely is mixed: I actually suspect this is because most office workers aren't productive at all, and certainly aren't productive in ways which are easier to track. Still, remote work promises significant real savings on office space, electricity and suchlike, and it does seem to make workers happier on the whole. There are some companies where working in person is genuinely a lot more productive for everyone, but those companies tend not to have to force a return, and on the whole, your average company is probably better off going fully remote: if you aren't going to get a huge amount of revenue out of your workers either way, you may as well reduce costs as much as you can. But here's the thing: remote work doesn't feel good for leaders. A lot of leaders get an almost euphoric rush from seeing and being able to control the people working for them, and being able to interrupt and micromanage your workers really helps with the terrible anxiety of not knowing whether your workers will be able to deliver what you expect them too. In short, there are a lot of emotional reasons that leaders prefer in-office work, and given how your average company is structured, nothing's there to stop them from making that call, even if it's stupid.
So, how does this tie into the earlier discussion about bullshit? An awful lot of bullshit is constructed to make people feel certain emotions, as opposed to trying to communicate directly. These can be positive, working on pride and self-importance, or negative, engaging fear and the dread of missing out. Bullshit, as much as it might be useless as communication, is brilliant for creating emotional state. It's also difficult to catch if you haven't been trained for it - catching how communication is making you feel requires some training in both mindfulness and media literacy, and a lot of experience in one or the other of those. In the absence of a more objective strategic plan to compare against, the emotive strategist is thus supremely vulnerable to bullshit. This also neatly explains the persistence question: people usually learn by comparing the results they get to their desired objectives, and importantly, to their strategic plan. With no such plan in place, the plan can't be updated (failure to update strategy as conditions change is, by-the-by, another major strategic sin). This means that even when bullshit is caught and called out, it's usually simply replaced with more bullshit, and you wind up with the "Azure-Snowflake-Databricks-Redshift" loop.
It's therefore no surprise that there exists a whole gamut of bullshit designed deliberately to attack this vulnerability, where an executive roughly knows what they need to do but has not the faintest idea of how they might carry it out. Technical products are particularly bad for this: it's very easy to develop sales copy that makes technology sound like it'll solve your business problem and increase your revenues without spelling out exactly how that's going to happen. And if the target doesn't have a clear strategic plan to lean on, they'll never catch the mistake they're making.
So, why is emotive strategy so prevalent these days?
The literacy crisis
You may have noticed that I've touched briefly on media literacy in the last section. I'm now going to expand the discussion to literacy more generally. Over the last thirty to sixty years (or feral hogs), our societies have become increasingly post-literate: literacy has become a passive skill that you might learn, but you don't really use day-to-day. On the whole, people don't really read long texts, and they certainly don't write much. The overall merits of this are debatable: I don't like it at all, and I can't imagine that many of my readers would either, but then, we're a bunch of hyper-literate weirdos. Who knows, maybe it'll be OK, but I'm not going to hold out hope.
Unfortunately, strategic thinking is a fundamentally literary skill, embedded in a literary culture. Oral cultures tend to think in ways that are much less linear or sequential than a literary culture might, and are much more reliant on socially embedded knowledge. These can be good things. However, sequential reasoning is necessary for complex social organisation: literacy itself developed as a direct result of the need to organise large societies where it developed (Mesopotamia, Egypt and China are the major ones that come to mind for me, but there are probably others). Running a complex society or organisation requires that we be able to set out clearly defined lines of reasoning in an organised, linear and sequential way: hell, even software is simply an extreme version of this in many ways. A deficit in literacy is thus necessarily going to impact strategic thinking negatively.
Without being able to read and retain information, the post-literate executive has a very limited amount of knowledge ready-to-hand. Now, I know that memorisation is unfashionable these days, but memorising quite a lot of stuff is essential for productive intellectual work. The more stuff you remember and have at your fingertips, the more of it you can use and the better you can get at working with and synthesising information. Even if you tend to look a lot of things up, you still have to remember that a given fact exists so that you can find it. I genuinely don't think that a lot of our executives have the memorised knowledge that they need to function effectively.
Moreover, learning how to write effectively allows you to structure your thoughts much better than just keeping it in your head does. Writing forces you to refine your ideas, tighten your arguments and make sure that the thread of your thought actually holds together, which is difficult to do verbally or in your head. At lower levels in the technical world, this usually manifests itself as sloppy code, poor management or badly architected systems. At the executive level, however, it manifests as a poor grasp of strategy: even if the executive's individual thoughts have some merit, a lack of skill with literacy means that they can't string them together into a coherent strategic picture. The door, of course, is thus left wide open to exploitation in the manner described above.
Unfortunately, it gets even worse. Not only do we see increasing strategic deficits, but bullshit claims are by far the easiest to detect in writing. The linear and sequential nature of the flow, coupled with the fact that you can access text on a page asynchronously in a way that you can't do with video or in a conversation makes it very easy to pick out when you're being manipulated or made to feel a certain way. It's also way easier to track an argument and see where things don't quite hold together, which again is very hard to do in oral or visual media. With that in mind, it's striking to see just how little text and how many images and videos are in modern technical marketing material and corporate communication more generally. The infographic in particular is roughly equivalent in function to a mediaeval illuminated manuscript: it communicates symbolically and is decorated appropriately, and the actual meaning of the text is secondary, left to clergy and scholars (like us). In so many ways, the post-literate executive is just amazingly ill-equipped to strategise, evaluate truth claims or detect bullshit when it's fed to them: a pretty bleak state of affairs.
What to do about it
I don't think there's much hope of training executives who really aren't interested in it in literacy or strategic thinking: they're certainly not going to be reading classical literature, and even a good text on mediaeval history is probably a bit beyond what we can expect. We might find one or two executives who came from enough of a literary background to do better, and a few executives that might be genuinely willing to learn, but in general, our main hope is in outcompeting bullshit-vulnerable people rather than changing them. So, how might we do this?
The first step is becoming sufficiently literate. If you've made it this far through what's quite a long article, you have sufficient passive literacy. I'll thus not dwell on this too much further, except to say that books are often better/more effective than reading on screens, and that reading widely for pleasure and curiosity is way more effective than a utilitarian approach. If you possibly can, go to a good library (I recommend academic libraries in particular), and just browse. Writing skills, however, are a thing that people often don't develop to the same extent, and I cannot recommend learning to write well enough. Setting up a blog and just writing about what interests you is an excellent way to do this. You do need an audience, but it doesn't have to be huge: my average post gets read about 200 times, and that's more than enough. And yeah, your writing will be bad at first, but you will see steady improvement: I mean, hell, you can see a notable difference between the writing style of my first blog post and my last one, and my first post was written when I was already quite a good writer. Reading mindfully is also an excellent way to improve your writing: read things slowly and carefully, think about what you do and don't like about the writing style, and take careful notes.
It would be foolish not to note that, while this is absolutely not the reason that you should write, writing can also be an excellent tool for networking and marketing: reader mail from this blog has been far more effective at generating work opportunities for me than just about anything else that I've done, which is gratifying but a little surprising. But that's a side note.
Being sufficiently literate, the second thing to do is to learn how to think strategically. The first step there, I think is a close-reading of Clausewitz and commentary on Clausewitz. A general study of military history can also be really useful here: aside from what they do, effective militaries have to be extremely good at operations and logistics, and states known for great martiality (Hongwu Emperor stans represent!) have to be extremely effective at strategic thought so that they don't squander their military might on pointless escapades (C.F. Pyrrhus of Epirus and his Italian expedition, which was highly effective from a tactical standpoint, but achieved shit-all politically thanks to Roman strategic depth). And there really is no better way to learn strategic thought than to learn what leaders in the past did and what did and didn't work. Translating this knowledge into a more civilian environment can be a bit of a challenge, so it is worth it to deliberately practice that skill.
Learning these two things makes you much harder to deceive, and much more effective in our modern society and economy. The success doesn't always look like the classic image of success, but of course, knowing these skills will allow you to recognise social images of success as the illusions that they are. Certainly, you will be happier, wealthier and harder to push around. And in any case, being able to think clearly is just that much more pleasant than living in a haze of shit.