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 we take a few swipes at Deloitte:

• Tech Waffle Torture - ‘Purpose’ taglines: inspiring or meaningless?

• Shallow Values - Value Creation: Your go-to power phrase

• Savage Takedowns - The Deloitte AI debacle is a reputation body slam

• Pop Culture Cringe - J.Lo - turning a career trainwreck into a tour

• LinkedIn Templates - Celebrating a CEO mindset by age five

• Dear Dr Comms - The advice Deloitte needed but didn’t expense

• WTF will ‘gradient descent’ teach you - apart from the perils of gravity?

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

Original Fluff: ‘Purpose’ Tagline for AI Tech Start Up
“Where Possibility Learns.”

Translated:
While Deloitte “makes an impact that matters”, we make sure that it’s not hallucinated.

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

 Value Creation

Creating Value For Clients
“This mostly means creating new billable categories and rebranding them as ‘innovation’”.

Creating Value For Shareholders
“Shareholder value is the only KPI we’d sell our souls for, and chew our hands off to deliver.”

Creating Value For Employees
“We talk about valuing staff but what we most value is when you don’t complain.”

Savage Takedowns – Spectator sport or heed the lesson

Impact That Doesn’t Matter: Deloitte’s AI Debacle
This past week, Deloitte got exposed for a report that contained AI-generated errors like fabricated quotes and bogus citations. A University of Sydney researcher flagged the mess, sparking public embarrassment and headlines about consultants leaning on unvetted AI to churn out ‘expert’ advice.

Spectator Sport
One of The Big Four, masters of ‘rigor,’ and intellectual depth caught outsourcing insight to a chatbot.

Heed the Lesson
If you sell expertise and use AI, double and triple check sources and facts - don’t cheap out. Because once trust goes, the refund is the cheapest thing you’ll pay.

Pop Culture Cringe – Out of touch comms worth your time

From Box Office Queen to Box Office Bomb
Last week, Jennifer Lopez’s new film Kiss of the Spider Woman limped into cinemas, quickly branded a flop. Once positioned as a multi-talented superstar, Lopez now faces a string of failures, cancelled concerts, underperforming movies, and critics flat-out questioning whether she can sing at all.

The façade of untouchable stardom cracked further: reports of diva demands, her divorce from Ben Affleck, and awkward ties to P. Diddy have turned online chatter into open mockery. The carefully maintained brand of enduring talent is collapsing under its own weight.

In tech, it’s like BlackBerry insisting it’s still a market leader while everyone else quietly moved on years ago.

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

Template 18: ‘The 5 life lessons I mastered in Kindergarten’

Everyone’s writing “5 things I wish I knew at 21.” 🙄

Cute. By 21, I’d already figured out life, the universe, and was well on my way to being a multi-millionaire - because I’d nailed these by age 5:

5 things I figured out by the time I was 5:
• Always be the loudest voice at show-and-tell. 🎤
• Nap time is just early mindfulness. 🧘
• Sharing toys builds your personal brand. 🚀
• Milk money is your first investment round. 💸
• Colouring inside the lines = knowing your KPIs. 📊

Why wait until adulthood to get ahead? Some of us were born influencers. 🌟

I’m proof it’s never too early to disrupt, dominate, and deliver exponential value. 🚀

Copy and paste if you learned KPIs before your ABCs.

#EarlyWisdom #KindergartenC-Suite #NapTimeHustle #SandboxStrategist.

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,

We delivered a $440,000 government report riddled with AI errors, phantom quotes, and references that never existed. The refund is underway, the headlines are brutal, and our proud line “making an impact that matters” has become a parody. How do we fix this? Yours, Impacted

Dear Impacted,

Before your consultancy turns into a case study in corporate comedy, let’s call in some unusual specialists:

🏗️ Building Inspector
On the surface, it looked fine, but up close, the workmanship was sloppy - shortcuts everywhere, details left unchecked. Get this fixed by a real builder, not someone who just started their apprenticeship yesterday.

🚸 School Crossing Lady
Reports are like busy intersections, facts flying everywhere. Your job was to stop the nonsense, hold up the sign, and let only safe information cross. Next time, don’t wave everything through.

🥗 Food Stylist
You’ve plated up fiction like fine dining. Strip off the plastic garnish, serve real substance, and pray the next course isn’t sent back.

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.