Corporate Influencers: The new monks in town

It isn’t clear when we began to live in a post-satire world, but the signs have become way easier to spot ever since the coronavirus pandemic. In 2021, a man posted on social media, about how he continued to hammer away at his laptop in a hospital, mere hours after his wife gave birth. He said that he was glad for work-from-home norms because this allowed him to be close to the child – while being connected to his work via the umbilical cord.
The post began a conversation about the lack of work-life balance, especially in a country like India. It also made people ask if the man thought only his wife was responsible for raising the baby. But to me, the most important question was to ask why he chose to post about it in the first place.

Anyone who follows a business influencer or corporate influencer understands this: They’re obsessed with self-improvement and gains.

No one would post about happily working from a hospital hours or days after the birth of their own child unless they expected something in return – a virtual pat on the back for their unwavering determination, an acknowledgment of the ‘hustler’ they are. Maybe even the satisfaction of knowing that their company’s HR department will take notice.
It didn’t matter whether there was any truth to the story, the only thing that mattered was how the world saw the man – a boss or employee capable of optimising every second he is alive.

Anyone who follows a business influencer or corporate influencer understands this: They’re obsessed with self-improvement and gains. They spout vague quotes like “Earn with your mind”, “Do epic shit” and “The cure to curiosity doesn’t exist” – which look great on merchandise but don’t really mean anything, at least in a practical sense. They’re also big fans of quotes by other famous people. They make basic acts of empathy and kindness at the workplace seem both rare and radical. They derive life lessons from the most mundane of experiences. A moving comparison of a folded currency note and a neat-looking one is a soulful take on valuing people equally. A story that seems to be about domestic violence at the start turns into a hack about…copywriting? And then there’s this brave account of a man who sacrificed his engagement on LinkedIn to spend time with his daughter.

Where boomers may have looked up to someone who made vast amounts of money and kept shareholders happy, millennials and Gen-Zs are drawn to entrepreneurs who earn big cheques but sound like monks.

These influencers are moved by garden-variety philosophy about success, power and learning. My favourite in this category is an influencer-podcaster who uses diagrams and graphs with just a few words sprinkled in: knowledge, allocation, iteration, repetition. I haven’t been able to decipher a single one of them yet. Pop philosophy is hardly a new genre of self-help literature, but thought leaders have managed to adopt it into their branding in a way that makes it seem ground-breaking. It’s the perfect show-don’t-tell technique: Not only am I financially successful, I’m also erudite. Where boomers may have looked up to someone who made vast amounts of money and kept shareholders happy, millennials and Gen-Zs are drawn to entrepreneurs who earn big cheques but sound like monks.

For such influencers and their followers, the line of difference between actual work and talking about their work is gradually disappearing. Corporate influencers profit greatly from creating a folklore or mythology about themselves – about their early struggles, the mistakes they made, the wisdom they gained. They create images of themselves as successful, but also at peace and fulfilled. They make hustling seem like a journey that ends in a life like their own.

Pop philosophy is hardly a new genre of self-help literature, but thought leaders have managed to adopt it into their branding in a way that makes it seem ground-breaking. It’s the perfect show-don’t-tell technique.

A Marketing veteran I met a month ago, first criticised the pretence of ‘subject matter experts’ and in the same breath asked me to help him create content for a blog as part of his portfolio – without any actual insights. Talk about manufacturing authenticity. Authenticity can be manufactured, after all, at a very affordable price – 15 takeaway coffees, to be precise – and a few hours on Google.

The most curious behaviour among corporate influencers, across all levels of experience and seniority, is the bizarre attempts at posturing kindness and good faith. Every other week, you’ll encounter stories by such influencers featuring people less privileged than themselves – a Starbucks barista, an Uber driver, and in some grotesque cases, a homeless person – from whom they seek inspiration. For their “simple” lives, for how they suffer every day, for how they make a living. For how they’re “positive” despite it all, and how we should learn from them.In some of these cases, the user in question will offer the less privileged person some help or support, and they’ll make sure to advertise that too.

If you spend enough time on LinkedIn, you will, like me, begin to wonder how the business of work was ever carried out before the age of internet and Corporate ‘gyaan’.

Performative behaviour and posturing is hardly limited to influencers in the world of business and entrepreneurship – performance and virtue signalling is how anyone with an audience on social media keeps themselves relevant and on the right side of the internet. What makes these displays of artificial kindness more obnoxious is that these people actually possess substantial power but end up saying more than they can do. If you spend enough time on LinkedIn, you will, like me, begin to wonder how the business of work was ever carried out before the age of internet and Corporate ‘gyaan’. Today if you say the words “growth hacking” and “thought leadership” and “traction” all together at once, you can manage to say a lot without having actually said anything. If you say “upskilling”, “Fortune 500” and “pivoting” in quick succession, the saint of capitalism will visit you and crown you Best Hustler of the Year as Bo Burnham’s ‘Bezos I’ plays in the background.

There is although, one redeemable thing about this trend: people combating corporate influencer cringe with humour (and hopelessness). Apart from compilations of the worst posts ever, there’s a step-by-step formula to going cringe-viral on LinkedIn. You can also check out ShlinkedIn, where people are using satire to mock the kings and queens of hustle culture, but sometimes it’s tough to tell what is ironic and what is not.

Ultimately, and maybe thankfully, there will always be this balance in the world. For every CEO who is jolted awake at 5 AM by the thought of a marketing deal, there is a Tumblr user or Redditor user saying, I do not have a dream job. I do not dream of labour.