During the BBC2 satirical comedy series W1A, Ian Fletcher, the BBC's fictional head of values, faces a real-time learning opportunity going forward. The series, a follow-up to the Olympic-administration spoof Twenty Twelve, mocks the language of modern management-speak – that strange mix of euphemism, obfuscation and tortured metaphor.

The picture it paints is of an organisation in which fear of making decisions has given rise to a nebulous mass of managers and consultants with titles like "director of strategic governance". No one wants to assume responsibility – except retrospectively, for a recognised success – and everyone covers their backs with impenetrable jargon.

That scenario is familiar to many office workers, and indeed previous BBC series have explored the managerial follies of other sectors, from stationery (The Office) to politics (The Thick of It) and sales (The Apprentice). In public life we often hear politicians slipping into management mush. A couple of weeks ago Ed Miliband was being exhorted by thinktanks to embrace "transformative change" with "a holistic and long-term approach".

But the notion of a superfluous managerial class plays particularly well in the popular perception of the BBC, following its recent crises. Nick Fraser, a BBC veteran and series editor of the acclaimed Storyville documentary strand, believes that, at base, all BBC comedy is about BBC management: "Everything from Monty Python to The Thick of It is rooted in this struggle the BBC has with management. I wish someone would write a PhD on it."

However, while Fraser acknowledges that W1A is a bit like "overhearing conversations in the lift", he thinks the show is out of date. The corporation's high-water mark of "needless management", he says, came about 10 years ago. The last-but-one director general, Mark Thompson "was much more of a technocrat, an overt managerialist, than the present DG [Tony Hall], who comes from a cultural institution. He's not in favour of all that management consultancy. To his great credit, he says the BBC should be figuring out its own future."

But if the BBC has become less enamoured of consultants and managerial fads, the same cannot be said of many other companies and institutions, where the pointless meetings and dubious team-building tasks that W1A ridicules are apparently thriving.

Despite the economic downturn, major consultancy companies are enjoying impressive growth. The most recent estimate of McKinsey's worldwide business, for example, put annual revenues above $7bn, with a 12.4% growth rate. And McKinsey, remember, was the company that advised Enron.

Of course management consultancy is a large field covering widely varying sectors, and much of it has nothing to do with the sort of jargon-swamp in which W1A's characters are mired. And there are also many types of consultants – brand consultants, digital consultants, networking consultants and, no doubt, consulting consultants.

All of them, in one way or another, are selling the same thing: modernity. Or its deceitful twin: novelty. Institutions tend to fall into reassuring habits and can become hidebound by the shared conviction that "that's how we've always done it". That's where consultants come in: with new ideas, innovative thinking, radical solutions.

While reorganising the office furniture may seem about as productive as rearranging the Titanic's deckchairs, we are told that behind such decisions lie the latest findings in evolutionary psychology, neuroscience and human resources. That last term is also testament to a more insidious problem – the belief that new ideas, or even old ideas, require a new language. They don't. But bad ideas do thrive in conditions of maximum claptrap.

Dan Franklin of Penguin Random House's Vintage Publishing group says the buzzword he now constantly encounters is "brand". "How can you turn your author into a brand? How can we make Vintage into a brand? This has become much more prevalent since Random House merged with Penguin because Penguin are of course the only brand in publishing, so they do a lot of brand-led stuff. So you do get a lot of people mangling the English language and you think 'Oh my God, where did they find this person?' And the answer's usually: down the pub."

In his essay Politics and the English Language, George Orwell wrote: "The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink."

It's in this "gap" that W1A's comedy is located, but it's also where many real-life professionals ply their trade, bamboozling the gullible and the desperate with their bewitching neologisms, barmy suggestions and bizarre leadership tests. Yet because they invariably present themselves as modernisers, those who resist or criticise their arguments risk being seen as traditionalists, stuck in old ways and outmoded thinking – a position that seldom promises rapid career advancement.

Perhaps the most convinced advocates and stubborn resistors of managerial innovation are both to be found in the creative industries, where experimentation and scepticism are equally valued. And nowhere is this struggle more visible than at the BBC.

"The BBC goes through ceaseless efforts to reform itself," says Fraser, "but really its management structure is immovable, very rigid and top-down. And it's an institution in which the staff are in a permanent state of scepticism about everything, which is basically what you have to be if you're a journalist or work in comedy. I think this attitude may be a problem at the BBC, but on the other hand it's the way you make great shows."

Or, as W1A's director of strategic governance would say: "Brilliant!"