THE STATIC

Hey You, Welcome! Here’s your weekly dose roasting tech spin, bluster and puffery. Laugh at the cringe, unjam your message.

This week in:

• Tech Waffle Torture - Join the dots, invent a strategy

• Shallow Values - Innovation: Just a buzzword - do not attempt it!

• Savage Takedowns - AI hype bubble: only 5% of AI projects succeed

• Pop Culture Cringe - Dancer shimmies; famous actor squirms

• LinkedIn Templates - Onboarding excitement - the buzz, the lovefest

• Dear Dr Comms - Sorting out phlegm, sports scores and nasty odours

• WTF does ‘Null Pointer’ mean? Think blank slides and big promises

Already subscribed? Excellent. If not, subscribe below. It’s your antidote to boring meetings filled with circular conversations and strategic vagueness.

Tech Waffle Torture Explained - We tell you what corporate speak really means. You’re welcome.

Original Fluff: Connecting the dots
Our platform seamlessly connects the dots across dynamic ecosystems, revealing synergies that power data-driven insights - streamlining collaboration, and unlocking scalable transformation at speed.

Translated:
Connects the dots = clients being impressed by our coloured circles and arrows on a whiteboard pointing to our solution as the silver bullet to their chaos.

Dynamic ecosystems = realising the dots are actually a tangle of rival vendors, overlapping tools, and duplicate contracts the client now has to babysit.

Revealing synergies = exposes how hopelessly entangled the client’s processes are, and the realisation to best leave things as they are.

Data-driven insights = shows that the client’s business is in a mess, where the CEO realises no amount of money will fix this clown car already on fire.

Streamlined collaboration = Teams now know each other’s ideas for improvement, and steal them to impress the boss.

Scalable transformation = replicating the same inefficiencies worldwide, now with improved security baked in.

Meaningfully Shallow Values – You get them as short and sweet ugly truths

INNOVATION

Innovation at Scale
“We held a two-day hackathon. After 48 hours of brainstorming, the winning idea was to add emojis to error messages. The CEO called it ‘transformative.’”

Fail Fast
“We preach ‘fail fast.’ First flop? The team was restructured, the manager fired, and the slide deck buried. Message received: don’t try again.”

Future-Ready
“Our big innovation was moving the roadmap slide one year forward. Same features, same delays, but the new date makes it visionary.”

Savage Takedowns – Spectator sport or heed the lesson

AI Hype: The 95% Failure Rate We Need To Talk About
Remember that AI revolution you paid attention to? It turns out that 95% of generative AI projects fail to deliver any returns – and that’s not the punchline; it's the setup. So, while boardrooms brag about ‘disruptive innovation,’ most of it amounts to empty slides and expensive hypotheses. Even Sam Altman, OpenAI’s CEO (and the biggest hype master out there), admitted that “some investors are likely to lose a lot of money.” When the music stops, will we see tech companies crash, while investors tally the wreckage?

Why it matters now:
The AI bubble is bursting, and market corrections are coming, but that doesn’t mean stop experimenting. Just ask financial services firms, who are still testing gen-AI, but “at a much slower rate” and with humans firmly in the loop. Now is the time to reassess, not retreat: focus on projects that genuinely solve client problems, drive efficiency, or open new revenue streams, not on shiny demos. AI isn’t a panacea, but when aligned to the right outcomes, it can deliver value.

Pop Culture Cringe – Out of touch comms worth your time

When A Professional Dancer Goes Full Awkward
At the 2025 Oscars red carpet, Julianne Hough asked Timothée Chalamet about his go-to dance move, then promptly body-rolled herself in front of him. Chalamet’s awkward “you didn’t have to do spinal adjustments” question and Julianne’s response, “I do spinal adjustments now,” sealed the viral fate. On her Heart of the Matter podcast, Hough admitted: “That was the most cringe moment of my life.”

In B2B tech, this is like unveiling your bold new product live on stage in front of a crowd of 3000 - a mix of clients, analysts and journos, only for the $40,000 demo video to crash. Your chief architect steps in, and mumbles through a wall of technical detail no one can hear. Major embarrassment, forever remembered.

Lesson?
Own your cringe. Hough’s honesty and ability to laugh at herself landed better than the body roll itself. In tech as in life, admitting when you’ve had a cringe moment makes you more relatable and likeable.

LinkedIn Popularity Templates – Syrupy, self-congratulatory. Surprisingly effective.

Template 14: The ‘Onboarding Glow-Up’ Post

There’s something about starting a new role that feels… magical. ✨

Day 1, my inbox was full of automated welcome messages, and each one felt like a handwritten note just for me. 💌

Three straight days of training? To some, that’s exhausting. To me, that’s investment.

Mandatory compliance videos? Some see rules. I see culture. Company manuals? Some see text. I see values.

Each click, each quiz, each policy document is another sign I’m exactly where I’m meant to be. 📚

Onboarding isn’t just orientation. It’s transformation. I just know this will be my favourite role ever… at least until I forget my password again. 🔑

#OnboardingOdyssey #NewHireGlow #PoliciesAsPurpose

Copy and paste with your lanyard selfie. Bonus points if you tag HR and call them your ‘north star.

Got some naval gazing or philosophical musing you’d like to turn into a syrupy LinkedIn post? Reply to this email with your request and I’ll do my best.

Dear Dr Comms – When spin fails, we call in the real professionals to fix our stuff-ups

Dear Dr Comms

The office mandate dragged us back to five days a week, but now I’m stuck next to the most annoying desk neighbour alive! He coughs up phlegm every five minutes, crunches through bags of chips, reheats fish curry at 11am, turns on sports results for every game imaginable, and yells the scores across the floor to his mates. His keyboard is so loud it could double as a percussion section. How do I ask him to stop without offending him, or triggering petty revenge? Yours, Slowly Losing Sanity

Dear Slowly Losing It,

Open plan offices: the modern torture chamber disguised as collaboration. But let’s hear from the experts:

👻 Ghost Hunter:
“Treat him like a restless spirit. Whisper respectful incantations like, ‘I sense your presence… but could you manifest more quietly?’ Arm yourself with noise-cancelling headphones to block the ectoplasm. If he doesn’t change, call it a haunting and do the paperwork to relocate to the basement.”

🐴 Horse Groomer:
“Approach gently, as you would a skittish stallion. Speak softly, make eye contact, and slip in a sugar cube before suggesting fewer curry clouds and less sideline commentary. If he bolts, pray he keeps galloping on into the wild.”

⚪ Pearl Diver:
“Think of patience as oxygen. Hold your breath, dive deep, and emerge only when you’ve surfaced the treasure: a polite request framed as admiration. ‘You bring such energy to the office… maybe channel some of it through headphones?’ If you run out of air, it’s time to find a job that offers remote.”

Got a problem you wouldn’t trust the Comms Dr to fix? Reply to this email, I’ll loop in real experts. 

What The Fluff (WTF)?! – Decoding tech, something that linguists, philosophers, and your boss refuse to do

Layer 8 Insights – Regular deep dives that explore the human error in tech.