The Bullshit Premium

Why Talking Well Now Pays Better Than Doing Well

There was a time when competence was the currency.

You learned how things worked.
Understood failure modes.
Earned trust because, when things went wrong, you were the person people turned to, not because you sounded confident, or could verbally spew the lastest corporate jargon but because you could actually fix the problem.

That time is gone.

In its place, we’ve created a parallel economy inside modern organisations, one where sounding capable pays better than being capable, where narrative outranks substance, and where visibility trumps responsibility.

Welcome to The Bullshit Premium.

It’s not written into contracts.
It doesn’t appear on payslips.
But it exists, and once you see it, you can’t unsee it.

What the Bullshit Premium Really Is

The Bullshit Premium is the extra reward given to people who can convincingly talk about work they do not meaningfully do.

They don’t carry operational risk.
Don’t own outcomes end-to-end.
Or don’t feel consequences personally.

But they can:

• Explain
• Frame
• Align
• Socialise
• Position
• Rebrand failure as progress

They live in meetings, decks, updates, and strategy sessions, orbiting the real work without ever touching it.

And crucially, they are often the most highly rewarded people in the system.

This isn’t accidental.
It’s structural.

How Competence Became Inconvenient

Modern organisations didn’t wake up one day and decide to reward bullshit.

They drifted there, slowly, logically, and with good intentions.

1. Scale Broke Line of Sight

As organisations grew, decision-makers moved further away from the work.

Leaders stopped seeing:

• What actually breaks
• Where systems are fragile
• How much effort does it take to keep things functioning

Instead, they saw representations of reality:

• Dashboards
• KPIs
• Slide decks
• Status updates

Reality became abstracted.

And once work becomes abstract, storytelling becomes power.

2. Language Replaced Evidence

We stopped asking:

“Can you do this?”

And started asking:

“Can you talk about this convincingly?”

Fluency became confused with expertise.
Confidence became mistaken for credibility.
Polished language masked a shallow understanding.

If you spoke well enough, nobody pressed further, because pressing further required understanding the work, and understanding the work required effort.

Bullshit thrives where curiosity dies.

3. Risk Was Pushed Downward

As organisations professionalised, risk was quietly outsourced to the lowest possible level.

Executives talked about strategy.
Middle managers talked about alignment.
Frontline workers absorbed the consequences.

The further up you went, the less you were expected to touch failure directly.

So, the system began to reward those who could:

• Avoid full ownership
• Spread accountability thinly
• Speak around problems rather than into them

The Bullshit Premium emerged naturally from this environment.

The Bullshitter Skillset

Bullshitters are not stupid.

That’s an important point.

They are often highly intelligent, socially adaptive, and acutely aware of how organisations actually function.

They master a specific toolkit:

• Strategic ambiguity
  Saying just enough to sound informed, never enough to be pinned down.
• Borrowed authority
  Referencing “industry best practice”, “what we’re seeing across the market”, or “the data”, without ever showing the data.
• Passive ownership language
  “We’re exploring”, “we’re aligning”, “we’re moving towards”.
• Perpetual optimism
  Every failure is reframed as learning. Every delay is reframed as refinement. Using the word “Challenging”.

Ask them how something works in detail, and the conversation dissolves into fog.

Not because they’re malicious, but because clarity creates accountability, and accountability is dangerous.

Why Organisations Reward the Bullshit Premium

Here’s the uncomfortable truth:

Bullshit feels safer than competence.

Competence disrupts.
Bullshit reassures.

Bullshit Does This:

• Reduces tension
• Maintains hierarchy
• Protects egos
• Smooths over uncertainty

Competence Does This:

• Exposes weak decisions
• Forces uncomfortable trade-offs
• Reveals gaps in leadership
• Makes failure visible

So, organisations unconsciously select for people who make leaders feel comfortable, not people who make problems visible.

The Bullshit Premium is the price paid for emotional comfort at scale.

The Hidden Cost Nobody Accounts For

The Bullshit Premium doesn’t show up in budgets.

But it extracts a brutal tax over time.

1. Operational Decay

When decisions are made by people who don’t understand consequences, systems rot quietly.

Processes become:

• Over-engineered
• Brittle
• Fragile under pressure

Workarounds multiply.
Heroics become normal.
Failure becomes “unexpected”.

Nothing is unexpected; it was just ignored.

2. Talent Drain

The people who actually know how things work don’t usually shout.

They notice patterns.
Will always flag risks.
Can even explain and outline consequences.

Then they get overridden by someone with better slides.

So, they disengage.
Or they leave, whilst wearing their “I told you so” hat on.

Not loudly.
Not dramatically.

Just enough at a time for the organisation not to notice, until it’s too late.

3. Cultural Cynicism

When people realise that talk matters more than outcomes, behaviour changes.

People stop caring about excellence.
They start caring about perception.

Meetings become theatre.
Language becomes defensive.
Trust erodes.

And once trust is gone, no amount of “culture initiatives” will fix it.

Why the Bullshitters Keep Winning

Because they understand the rules of the game better than anyone else.

They don’t try to be excellent.
but, try to be indispensable without being accountable.

They:

• Stay visible
• Stay vague
• Stay aligned with power

Never fully own failure.
And, never fully own success.

They just survive, quarter after quarter.

In many organisations, survival is success.

The Real Tragedy

The tragedy isn’t that bullshit exists.

It always has.

The tragedy is that we’ve trained entire organisations to mistake bullshit for leadership.

We’ve sidelined:

• Engineers who understand failure
• Operators who carry risk
• Leaders who speak plainly

Because plain language sounds unsophisticated to people who don’t understand the work.

And complexity is easily mistaken for intelligence.

What Real Leadership Looks Like (And Why It’s Rare)

Real leaders don’t speak to impress.

They speak to clarify.

• Use fewer words
• Accept visible responsibility
• Admit uncertainty without hiding behind jargon
• Ask better questions than they answer

They don’t dominate rooms.
Don’t polish narratives.
and don’t protect themselves first.

Which makes them deeply threatening to bullshit systems.

Because real leadership exposes reality, and reality is expensive.

How to Spot the Bullshit Premium in Your Organisation

Ask yourself:

• Who talks the most about work they never touch?
• Who survives repeated failure without consequence?
• Who becomes “strategic” the moment accountability approaches?
• Who controls the story but never owns delivery?

You already know the answers.

Everyone does.

Why This Matters Now

We’re entering a period where:

• Systems are strained
• Margins are thin
• Complexity is unforgiving

Bullshit does not scale under pressure.

When things break:

• Language stops working
• Slides don’t fix anything
• Titles don’t solve problems

Only competence does.

And organisations overloaded with Bullshit Premiums discover, very suddenly, that they’ve hollowed themselves out.

A Final Comment

If you’re a leader reading this and feeling defensive, good.

That reaction matters.

If you’re an operator who’s felt invisible, you’re not wrong. However, you need to protect yourself, as bullshitters are excellent at gaslighting and career assassinations.

And if you’ve built a career on sounding capable rather than being capable, understand this:

The bill always comes due.

Bullshit can survive good times.
It cannot survive reality.

And reality has a habit of returning without warning.

Next in this three-part series:
Bullshit Endurance, how organisations learn to Live with Dysfunction and Mistake Survival for Strength.