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CASE: M-370 (B)

DATE: 03/29/2018

HUMOR: SERIOUS BUSINESS – CASELET STUDIES

BRIAN FUGERE:

BIGGER THAN BULLSH*T

It was early 2001, and Brian Fugere, CMO of Deloitte Consulting, faced a big challenge. The

sudden rise and fall of Internet consultancies combined with the regulatory challenges introduced

by Enron’s epic fail had left the consulting industry in upheaval. Amidst this tumult, Fugere was tasked with crafting a strong, distinct market positioning for Deloitte’s multibillion-dollar consulting business. The challenge: Business generally viewed consultants as a “necessary evil,” and lumped all consultants together in the same unsavory broth.

Fugere started where most CMOs start: by talking to clients and understanding their needs. But

these conversations took an unexpected twist. While he expected to hear about things like value

propositions, industry expertise, methodologies, and other staples of the consulting trade, clients

kept coming back to an unexpected grievance. Deloitte people (and other consultants) had

stopped behaving—and speaking—like humans. Fugere recalled their words:

So much bullsh*t! I wish they’d just talk straight to us. 1

At first, he brushed off the comments. But when clients kept coming back to this theme, he

began to realize that the issue was bigger than bullsh*t—it was really signaling a lack of

humanity in business. Over his 20+ years in management consulting, Fugere had noticed a

troublesome shift in his company’s corporate culture. Deloitte had grown into a global giant, and its once relationship-focused culture had gradually been replaced with a more transactional

Interview with Brian Fugere, November 2, 2017. Subsequent quotations are from authors interviews, unless

otherwise indicated.

Peter Seibert (MBA ’15); Stanford GSB General Atlantic Professor of Marketing Jennifer Aaker; and Lecturer Naomi Bagdonas (MBA ’15) and prepared this case as the basis for class discussion rather than to illustrate either effective or ineffective handling of an administrative situation.

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p. 2Humor: Serious Business – Caselet Studies M-370 (B)

approach. By 2000, Deloitte was on its way to becoming, according to Fugere, “a sterile environment that lacked humanity.”

At the same time, a broader environmental shift was taking place. In the wake of the Internet

boom, the stodgy formality of business was being attacked and replaced with the more casual

conversation of entrepreneurs. The War of the Suits and the Hoodies was underway.

So what started out as a plaintiff cry for “less bullsh*t” became a mission to infuse humanity back into business. In doing so, Fugere sought to not only reposition his company, but

fundamentally change the way that business got done in arguably the most humorless corner of

corporate America: professional services.

START WITH A TOOL

Fugere realized that if he was going to infuse humanity back into Deloitte, he was going to have

to teach his people to communicate like humans again. Once that began to shift, the entire

company culture would begin to shift with it. In fact, this realization was the central idea behind

the Theory of Linguistic Relativity (see Exhibit 1). This theory hypothesized that the language

we speak directs how we think, and therefore, act. If Fugere could shift the language of the

company, he could shift the entire way they approached every aspect of their work.

Fugere sent out a company-wide email highlighting the issue: Clients were fed up with the way

we communicated with them and were requesting straight speak—communications without

jargon or hyperbole. Amid a deluge of responses, one idea came back that struck Fugere:

Deloitte should develop software that detects bullsh*t. Just like a spellchecker—only for

bullsh*t. Fugere was immediately on board. He explained:

It was a fabulous idea. It solved the problem from a practical standpoint by giving

people a tool they could use every day. And it highlighted the issue in a way that

made people laugh. It was just so ironic… consultants developing software to attack their own language!

He assembled a small team consisting of a designer, a programmer, and a writer who set out to

build the software. First, they asked all employees to submit their least favorite bull words. Out

of 10,000 responses, they created a dictionary of hundreds of the most egregious bullsh*t words

and ranked them by severity. The team also turned to the work of Dr. Rudolph Flesch, a 1940s

researcher who did extensive work on clear writing. Fugere’s team combined the jargon list with

Flesch’s research to create a sophisticated algorithm to measure the readability of a document. They called the resulting score a “Bull Index.” This index scored each document between one and ten. A one meant the writer was completely full of it, while a ten meant the writer had

crafted a clear and highly readable document.

Then the team programmed this formula and the bulls*t dictionary into software capable of

scanning any PowerPoint or Word document. The software not only provided a Bull Index

score, but also, when appropriate, a humorous tongue-lashing to highlight evidence of bullsh*t.

For example, a particularly low score might invite the following rebuke: D o

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p. 3Humor: Serious Business – Caselet Studies M-370 (B)

Diagnosis: you live in a rare, often irreversible state of obscurity. You are

absolutely dependent on other advanced obscurists to understand anything you are

trying to communicate. Sentences may be entirely devoid of dictionary-based

words. Doctors at the Bull Institute would pay to study you.

The best news about the software—it actually worked. Fugere described it this way:

If you put a document through and got a 3.7, you’re like “damn, I can do better.” So you go back, make some changes, then get a 4.6. Then you make some more

changes and you try to make your document even better. It simply trained you to

write better. But perhaps most importantly, it forced you to think hard about what

you were communicating and how you could get your point across with clarity.

MAKE IT A MOVEMENT

With the product built, Fugere then set about figuring out how to use the tool as springboard to

something bigger. The team again turned to humor:

We decided to call the software Bullfighter. From an adoption and intrigue

perspective, it was probably the single most important decision we made. A

typical management consulting name would have been something like

“communication jargon-detector.” How boring would that have been?

To lend gravity and seriousness to the effort, the team researched the public communications of

the 30 companies in the Dow Jones Industrial Average. Not surprisingly, they found a

significant positive correlation between the clarity of communications and the performance of a

company’s stock. The clearer the communications, the better the stock performed. This helped catapult the issue beyond just jargon—as it turned out, straight speak was not only culturally

connective, but also just plain good business.

Deloitte released the software in June 2003, accompanied by a public relations push. The story

immediately went viral—the media loved the cheekiness of the name “Bullfighter” and the irony of a consulting firm that was calling bullsh*t on itself and its own industry. Bullfighter received

literally hundreds of media mentions from around the world, and sparked a multi-week debate in

the editorial pages of the New York Times about jargon and language in business. Deloitte’s website, which was not exactly “Google trending” material, received an unprecedented number of visits. Deloitte offered the software free on its website, and in the first 30 days Bullfighter

was downloaded over 400,000 times.

BEYOND SOFTWARE

With Deloitte’s own employees plus hundreds of thousands of other users, the software began to make a meaningful dent in how people thought about business communications. Perhaps most

importantly, it set a high bar for Deloitte’s consultants. With such a public commitment to straight talk, employees knew clients would expect them to deliver accordingly. D

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p. 4Humor: Serious Business – Caselet Studies M-370 (B)

The software paved the way for further investments in straight talk. Deloitte created a series of

ten Straight Talk books—small booklets that helped decipher and clearly present core insights on

topics ranging from Sarbanes-Oxley legislation to “How to Get the Most Out Of Your

Consultant.”

And, finally, Bullfighter helped Deloitte understand the benefits of making investments in

creative, culture-focused projects. In subsequent years, Deloitte invested in a Film Festival that

involved 45,000 employees. It further went on to team with the scientific advisor to Match.com

to create a proprietary personality profiling system that was recently featured on the cover of the

Harvard Business Review. In Fugere’s words:

Bullfighter showed that Deloitte is an enterprise that has a real soul. It signaled

that it was willing to do things differently, including (gasp!) things that are

actually fun. And Bullfighter gave other people in the organization the courage to

takes some risks and try new things.

CONCLUSION

Fugere tackled Deloitte’s big challenge with humor and humanity, addressing these three questions:

1. How do you take on a tectonic shift in our industry and inspire your employees?

2. How do you fix a key problem that is all but institutionalized?

3. How do you make a large and growing company feel intimate and connected?

Humor helped realign company culture, and it reinforced the core principles that helped

consultants relate not only to their clients, but also to their colleagues. It opened the door for

others to be bold and take risks. It provided key external and internal messaging and attracted the

kind of media attention that signaled “Deloitte is different.”

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p. 5Humor: Serious Business – Caselet Studies M-370 (B)

Exhibit 1

Note on Linguistic Relativity

Linguistic Relativity, in the simplest of terms, looks at the way our language influences how we

perceive the world. It hypothesizes that the language we speak directs how we think, and

therefore, act.

If we look at this hypothesis alongside our case on Bullfighter, Deloitte’s culture was becoming less attentive and transactional in its approach to business. By simply adjusting the words used

by its employees, the company was able to significantly realign the company’s culture, which had massive productivity ramifications for the company.

Tips to Rid Oneself Of the Bullsh*t (After all, Bullfighter was programmed to work on Windows 95)

Scan your correspondence, presentations, memos, and reports:

1. Find any long-winded, run-on sentences. How many can you break into short,

declarative sentences?

2. Use simple, direct, and clear language. What are the unnecessary words? (There are

always unnecessary words). Delete them. Don’t feel bad about it.

3. What several-syllable words could be expressed with shorter, more precise choices?

4. Scan for buzzwords and buzz phrases. Replace them with specific, personal choices.

“Your talk was a hit at the conference—bravo!” is a far better introduction than “I hope this finds you well.”

5. Eliminate use of the passive voice.

Getting rid of your bullsh*t takes practice. Re-reading with a critical eye will get you far. When

in doubt use the ever-popular “KISS” framework. Keep It Simple, Stupid.

Source: Brian Fugere and Deloitte Consulting.

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p. 6Humor: Serious Business – Caselet Studies M-370 (B)

Exhibit 2

The Bullfighter Software

Source: Brian Fugere and Deloitte Consulting.

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This document is authorized for educator review use only by JAY RAO, Babson College until Apr 2019. Copying or posting is an infringement of copyright. [email protected] or 617.783.7860