Let us start with a sentence. A real sentence, published in a peer-reviewed academic paper, used as an example of corporate communication at its finest: "Working at the intersection of cross-collateralization and blue-sky thinking, we will actualize a renewed level of cradle-to-grave credentialing and end-state vision in a world defined by architecting to potentiate on a vertical landscape."
Now. Did you read that and think: "Hmm, this person sounds like they know what they're talking about"? Or did you read it and think: "This is the most spectacular pile of nonsense I have encountered since the last all-hands meeting?"
If it was the former, science has some rather uncomfortable news for you.
Shane Littrell, a psychologist at Cornell University, has just published a peer-reviewed paper in Personality and Individual Differences with what is arguably the greatest title in the history of academic research: "The Corporate Bullshit Receptivity Scale: Development, validation, and associations with workplace outcomes."
Over four studies involving 1,018 working adults, Littrell has built, tested, and validated a measuring instrument - the CBSR - that quantifies exactly how susceptible you are to corporate bullshit. The sentences above? They were not written by anyone. They were algorithmically generated by a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet that randomly combined buzzwords stripped from Fortune 500 executive quotes, annual reports, and industry publications. Syntactically coherent. Semantically empty. Meaningless by construction.
And a statistically significant portion of people - actual employed adults - rated them as demonstrating genuine "business savvy."
Let that sink in while you prepare for your next "deep dive on our go-forward strategy."
Here is where it stops being merely funny and starts being professionally relevant.
Littrell found that higher corporate bullshit receptivity - i.e., being more impressed by the algorithmically generated nonsense - was significantly and negatively associated with fluid intelligence and actively open-minded thinking. In a multiple regression model, the two strongest negative predictors of corporate bullshit receptivity were exactly those two things. People who are better at analytical thinking, and who reason more carefully before forming judgments, are specifically less impressed by the waffle. Not less receptive to corporate communication generally - just the made-up kind.
"More cognitively sophisticated workers are not simply less receptive to corporate speech overall," Littrell writes. "Instead, they are specifically less impressed by corporate bullshit."
The really damaging finding, however, is in Study 3. Littrell gave participants a situational judgment test - a validated measure of work-related decision-making widely used in hiring and promotion - and found that corporate bullshit receptivity was the single strongest negative predictor of performance. Not fluid intelligence. Not job satisfaction. Not trust in their supervisor. Corporate bullshit receptivity. Controlling for everything else, the more you found the algorithmically generated nonsense impressive, the worse your workplace decision-making.
The CBSR was also, when put head-to-head against the most widely used existing measure of bullshit receptivity in the academic literature, a superior and more robust predictor of workplace decision-making. Context, it turns out, matters enormously. You need a corporate-specific instrument to catch the corporate-specific fool.
There is a particularly delicious finding buried in the data that every manager in the country should print out and stick to their wall.
People who score higher on corporate bullshit receptivity are also more likely to engage in persuasive bullshitting themselves. In other words, the people most easily fooled by corporate waffle are also most likely to produce it. They are both the market and the manufacturer. The demand creates the supply, which creates more demand.
This, for those keeping score at home, is what the paper's author calls the nomological network of corporate bullshit. The rest of us might call it a Tuesday afternoon at the office.
And then there is this. Workers who reported perceiving the highest levels of bullshit in their organizations - those most likely to complain that their workplace is saturated with meaningless jargon - were not better at detecting it. They were actually more likely to spread it themselves. The people most vocally cynical about corporate nonsense are, the data suggests, simultaneously its most enthusiastic generators. Littrell acknowledges this was "unexpected." The authors of every corporate strategy document ever written will find it deeply validating.
The insurance sector should approach these findings with something between uncomfortable recognition and outright alarm. This is an industry that - let us be generous - has historically not been shy about the buzzword.
"Agentic AI," "ecosystem disruption," "holistic risk strategies," "value-chain optimization," "customer-differentiated value proposition," "parametric solutions for dynamic risk environments." These phrases have appeared, without irony, in carrier communications, broker pitches, conference keynotes, and annual reports across the industry in the past twelve months alone. Some of them contain genuine meaning. A statistically significant proportion almost certainly do not.
The practical applications of Littrell's research are, to use a term he would probably appreciate, non-trivial. If bullshit receptivity predicts worse workplace decision-making - and it does, robustly, across multiple studies and samples - then an organization whose communication culture rewards impressive-sounding but semantically empty language may be selecting, promoting, and retaining the wrong people. The best analytical thinkers are, by definition, specifically less impressed by the waffle. If your internal culture values the waffle, you are running a filter that works precisely backward.
There is also the question of what happens to clients. An underwriter who finds "we will pressure-test a renewed level of adaptive coherence in the market between us and others who are solutioning to download on a similar balanced scorecard" genuinely impressive - rather than immediately and viscerally suspicious - is probably not the person you want pricing a complex commercial risk.
Littrell is careful about this. The CBSR is not, he stresses, intended as a substitute for validated cognitive ability testing, and "any high-stakes use would require further validation." He is a scientist, which means he qualifies things.
But he does suggest the scale could eventually serve as a useful supplementary indicator in selection, hiring, or promotion decisions - providing a resource-efficient signal about analytical thinking and reflexive open-mindedness. He also notes that intervention research is needed, and that longitudinal studies might test ways of "attenuating corporate bullshit receptivity among supervisors and employees."
In the meantime, here is a simple heuristic, provided free of charge: if a sentence from your annual report, your investor presentation, or your internal all-hands communication could have been generated by a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet randomly combining words from a corporate buzzword bank - and you cannot immediately explain what it means in plain English - delete it.
You are not "architecting to potentiate on a vertical landscape." You are running an insurance company. Say that instead.
All quotes below are real, verified, and published within a year. None were algorithmically generated - though in several cases, a panel of independent judges might struggle to tell the difference.
Source: 2026 Global Insurance Outlook, Deloitte Center for Financial Services, October 2025
The report's closing recommendations section - grandly titled "The time is now to walk the talk" - is a masterclass in the genre. Each bullet point arrives dressed in the language of strategic imperatives while saying something a reasonably attentive nine-year-old could have summarized in five words.
First, on the customer:
"Prioritize customer-centricity: Meet evolving customer expectations for speed, convenience, and personalized experiences with a holistic approach, which should involve integrating digital and human touchpoints to deliver seamless and empathetic service."
Translation: make your app work and be pleasant on the phone. Thirty-three words to say what eight would have managed. Note the obligatory deployment of "holistic," "seamless," and "touchpoints" in a single sentence - a feat of consultancy compression achieved with admirable economy.
Then, on risk:
"Shift to proactive risk management: Leverage data-driven insights, invest in predictive modeling, and work with stakeholders to implement preventative measures to mitigate losses."
Use data. Build models. Stop bad things from happening. Seventeen words distilled into thirty-two. The phrase "leverage data-driven insights" is particularly impressive: it instructs insurers to use their data by using their data, a piece of advice that contains its own solution as a prerequisite.
And the closing line of the entire report, offered as a rallying cry:
"The future of insurance is here, and carriers will need to decide how to most effectively transform business models, infrastructure, and talent to remain profitable."
The future is here. Change or lose money. Twenty-six words. Seven of them are doing genuine work.
Source: KPMG Insurance homepage, kpmg.com, 2025–2026
KPMG's global insurance landing page - the page an insurance executive sees first when they visit the firm's website - closes with what may be the single finest sentence produced by any consultancy in this survey:
"By addressing the full insurance value chain, we help turn operational transformation and purposeful decision-making into your competitive advantage. The result is a more connected, people-centered, and performance-driven enterprise, helping you reimagine a future that's insured by today."
"Reimagine a future that's insured by today." It is not clear that it means anything beyond the wordplay itself. The author of this sentence works for one of the world's largest professional services firms and presumably charges significant fees to think about insurance. The sentence has been reviewed, approved, and published as the final word on what KPMG does. It is, by some margin, the closest any Big Four firm has come to producing a haiku.
Source: Intelligent Insurance: A Blueprint for Creating Value Through AI-Driven Transformation, KPMG, 2025
KPMG's flagship insurance AI report, from which the following is taken verbatim:
"The intelligent insurer leverages advanced technologies, personalized experiences, data-driven insights and automated operations to enhance efficiency, innovation and resilience. Focused on embedding intelligence across value streams and processes, it ensures seamless customer interactions, robust risk management, intelligent product manufacturing and future-ready adaptability to thrive in the intelligent economy."
There is much to admire here. "Future-ready adaptability to thrive in the intelligent economy" contains five nouns, one adjective functioning as a noun, and communicates approximately one idea: be ready for the future. The phrase "intelligent product manufacturing" is applied to insurance - a service industry that does not manufacture products in any conventional sense. The word "intelligent" appears four times in two sentences: the intelligent insurer, embedding intelligence, intelligent product manufacturing, the intelligent economy. By the end of the paragraph, the word has been drained of all meaning, like a sponge wrung past the point of saturation.
Source: KPMG 2025 Global Insurance CEO Outlook, March 2026
"Strategic partnerships, selective inorganic growth, and sustained investment in talent and technology will be essential to building long-term competitive advantage in a rapidly evolving insurance ecosystem."
"Selective inorganic growth" means buying companies rather than building them organically - a perfectly serviceable concept that deserves its jargon. "Rapidly evolving insurance ecosystem" means the insurance market is changing, a claim so universal that it has appeared in every insurance report published since approximately 1987. Eight words in this sentence are doing genuine work. Fourteen have arrived to make the eight look busier than they are.
Source: Five Ways Insurance CFOs Drive Value from Transformation, EY, March 2026
EY published this report simultaneously across more than thirty country websites - a deployment that is itself a kind of performance art. The content, wherever you access it, is identical:
"To execute complex and demanding agendas, insurance CFOs have embraced bold transformation plans, but face significant challenges in generating returns. In addressing internal and external challenges, CFOs are seeking to empower workers with advanced technology and greater emphasis on high-value work. A holistic operating model for finance can help insurers drive past common transformation barriers and realize higher returns on change initiatives."
"Drive past common transformation barriers" is a phrase that deserves careful attention. It means, in the most generous reading, "get better at changing." The metaphor is of an executive in a car, accelerating through the cones of organizational inertia, emerging on the other side into a frictionless plain of holistic operations. The word "holistic" appears here, as it does in almost every EY insurance document ever published, with the reliability of a tide.
"The different elements of the target operating model can be viewed individually. But finance transformation strategies should address them holistically with the goal of establishing highly integrated and intelligent operations closely aligned to the most urgent needs of the business."
Look at all the parts, not just one part. This advice is correct. It required forty-two words to deliver.
Source: Global Insurance Report 2025: The Pursuit of Growth, McKinsey, November 2024
McKinsey's contribution is characteristically terse - the firm has the confidence to deploy its jargon in short, declarative bursts rather than long, sinuous sentences. The effect, if anything, is more authoritative:
"Reimagine the value chain end to end, developing lean organizations, establishing effective operations."
Twelve words. Change how you work, top to bottom, and do it efficiently. The verb "reimagine" is doing a significant amount of heavy lifting here: it implies that the existing value chain was the product of a previous act of imagination, and that the new one must be conceived entirely afresh, rather than merely adjusted. Insurance companies that are simply improving their operations are not reimagining. They are incrementally adjusting. McKinsey charges considerably more for reimagining.
McKinsey is also the firm that introduced "ecosystem orchestration" to the insurance industry's vocabulary, via its insurance ecosystems series, which remains actively cited in carrier strategy documents:
"Orchestration means assembling various services into seamless customer journeys."
An "ecosystem orchestrator" is an insurance company that also sells other things. The word "orchestrate" now appears in approximately one in four insurance strategy documents, where it means "coordinate." The difference in billing rates between orchestrating and coordinating is difficult to calculate precisely, but it is not zero.
Every firm uses "holistic," "seamless," "ecosystem," "leverage," "transformation," "customer-centricity," and "value streams" so interchangeably, across so many documents published in the same six-month window, that running any two of their reports through Shane Littrell's Corporate Bullshit Receptivity Scale's algorithmic generator would produce output indistinguishable from the originals.
That is not, it should be noted, an insult. It is, per Littrell's peer-reviewed paper in Personality and Individual Differences, a testable empirical hypothesis. The CBSR was built by stripping real corporate speech down to its syntactic bones and reassembling the vocabulary randomly. The question the Big Four should now be asking is: how much of their output would survive that test?
On current evidence, the answer is: not as much as they are charging for.
The Corporate Bullshit Receptivity Scale: Development, validation, and associations with workplace outcomes, by Shane Littrell, is published in Personality and Individual Differences, Vol. 255 (2026), available at https://doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2026.113699
Insurance Business does not recommend using the CBSR to evaluate your CEO. Mostly because you would have to explain to them what it measures.
