I absolutely think that this is the result of the chaotic formation of a bizarre American religion (that is largely universal among the world's "middle class" now.) It's Silva Mind Control -> Leadership Dynamics -> Holiday Magic, Scientology, Large Group Awareness Training (as you can still see in the Landmark Forum), Synanon, etc.; mixed up in a pot with hippie language/consciousness raising, 70s-80s spiritual self-help Carlos Castaneda and Jane Roberts/Seth neo-Spiritualism; all banged in with garbled Cybernetics, RAND corporation papers, military operations jargon and the 70s-80s obsession with personal physical fitness and orthorexia.
In the end, you just have this universal language to justify and excuse power and blame victims for being weak enough to be victimized. Powerful people move with the energy flow and direct it, and weak people move against it, twist it, and are twisted by it. Mastery of this makes money and happiness flow towards you, and resistance to it makes money and happiness flow away from you.
Very convenient moral calculus for people who inherited money and hand it to people who do what they say. Convenient justification to do anything that pays, no matter how corrupt and harmful. If it were really harmful, it wouldn't pay in the end. And isn't everything harmful, in a way, to some extent?
In the 80s, you start to see books laying out fairly incoherent systems for total personal, business and societal organization, but the premises are really drawn from all of the previous nonsense. It's easy to say it's stupid, but leading into this time (and dying during this time along with its practitioners) the overwhelmingly dominant psychological theory was the cynical word salad of Freudian psychoanalysis. This stuff was honestly more based in the real world.
> Before that it was more of a political and religious style of communication.
This is the time when the terminology was finally settling. There was to be a new priesthood of consultants. Tbh, I don't think that it's designed to be popular, it's designed to supply language to justify predatory acts. This was also the rise of the "think tank," which came to dominate society through writing laws and supplying the language to help politicians deliver for their donors.
I still think that the real harm was done by the popularization of Freud, training the public to speak about the real world in speculative, scientistic, psychological terms. This sort of management language just washes over people trained not to ever verify their theory-theories against any sort of real outcomes (i.e. Freud), other than the post hoc justification of wealth.
My father went into "organizational development" in the late-80s at Allstate Insurance. Bringing this all full-circle, it turned out he was also being trained in crypto-Scientology: https://www.lermanet.com/scientologynews/allstate2.html
Sorry about the rant, it might come off as word salad. I wish it was.