Corporate bullshit generator

How a corporate bullshit generator works

A corporate bullshit generator keeps a few sentence shapes with blanks in them. It fills each blank from a word list: an adverb, a verb, an adjective or two, a noun. Ours has 14 shapes, 24 adverbs, 80 verbs, 80 adjectives and 80 nouns. Some shapes take a second clause after “so that we can” or “in order to”, which is how a sentence gets long without saying anything.

Many of the words are corporate buzzwords you hear in meetings every week: synergy, bandwidth, leverage, north star.

CBSG, running since 2011

Gautier de Montmollin’s Corporate Bullshit Generator, CBSG, has been on SourceForge since June 2011 and was last updated in June 2026. It’s free under the MIT license, written in Ada, and claims more than 1,700 words and phrases and about 1,000 A4 pages of text a second.

Its bad news is always plural. A comment in its code says a singular would invite someone to ask for details.

Corporate speak generator or real CEO

At Cornell, Shane Littrell built one in Microsoft Excel for a study published in 2026. He took real Fortune 500 executive quotes and stripped out the nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs. Then he refilled the gaps at random from a word bank drawn from annual reports and business leaders’ quotes. Across four studies, 1,018 people rated the results and the real quotes for “business savvy”. Five of the real quotes were statistically indistinguishable from the random ones.

Workers who rated the nonsense highly also rated their supervisors as more charismatic, and did worse at workplace decisions. Littrell’s own generator is online now. Its button reads “Press here to Growth-hack”.

Corporate BS in real company memos

Real company memos work like the generator. A plain decision goes in, and a paragraph about opportunity comes out.

Take the memo that cuts the holiday rate. It explains that holidays are for rest, so working one will no longer pay extra. A second memo follows, disappointed to find the holiday rota empty. The return-to-office FAQ is another. Every question, from where to sit to where to park, gets the same answer, which is to check with HR.

Collaboration is the reason given for more office days, and nobody says how it will be measured. The gym and the canteen get a line of their own. They “will not be returning at this time”, which is memo for gone.

Corporate ipsum for mockups

Set it to five sentences and copy them, and you have a paragraph of filler for a slide, a wireframe or a pitch deck. Lorem ipsum tells a reviewer the copy isn’t written yet. Corporate ipsum reads like a finished strategy page, so the review moves on to the logo.

Corporate BS generator for meetings

Read five of them out on a call and somebody’s buzzword bingo card fills up before the second agenda item. Keep the plain-English lines to yourself.

Save one for the questions at the end. When someone asks the pointed one, a generated sentence and a promise to circle back closes the subject for the day.