HUMOR
The Business Jargon Glossary, Chapter 1
Feel free to leverage this at your earliest convenience.
As an undergrad, I minored in French. But when I leaped from a liberal-arts background into B2B sales, I soon picked up a third language: Businessese.
Whether it’s a distinct language versus a socioeconomic dialect of English is an ongoing debate. For the (blissfully) ignorant, it’s confusing all the same.
If you’re trying to finagle a cushy white-collar job offer, then speaking business-ese like a native is critical.
But fear not. I, the Ambrose Bierce of corporate America, will have you conversant in no time.
Leverage
Noun; verb
Business-ese speakers leverage “leverage” where the rest of us use “use.” Finance folks also leverage “leverage” to describe debt and derivatives. They then leverage their leverage for outsized returns or catastrophic crashes (whichever comes first).
Clear?
Best practices
Noun, generally plural
“Best practices” is a marvelously concise phrase to tell prospective clients, “No worries, I’ve thought about this before.”
You call it vague yet obvious; I call it flexible and reassuring. Potato, potato.
Beyond that generic usage, it often appears in contexts where performance is nearly impossible to measure. For instance, the phrase features most heavily the Management Consulting dialect of North American Businessese.
However, recent data suggest its use plateaued after the financial crisis impugned the best practice of leveraging leverage.
Scalable
Adjective
Businessese speakers use “scalable” to broadly describe that which will (or is assumed to) yield unprecedented earnings, influence, or efficacy without entailing more work.
Descriptive and aspirational uses are equally common, although a precise definition eludes most linguists.
Researchers most often identify this term during conversations between long-time speakers of the Software Businessese and VC Businessese sub-dialects.
For reasons obvious to all fluent speakers, it’s a best practice to leverage scalability whenever possible.
Data-driven
Adjective
Among Businessese speakers, there’s a deep-seated cultural affinity for desiring, gathering, organizing, and/or discussing large sets of numbers.
In most dialects, such individuals (and the organizations they constitute) are known as “data-driven.”
The term generally applies regardless of the results, cost, or methodological soundness of the data involved. Objectively, it only denotes accumulation, much like a hoarder could refer to their life “tchotchke-driven.”
So far, scholars believe the sentiment of the phrase is exclusively positive. We have yet to find a pejorative use of “data-driven” in native Businessese dialogue. In common use, data-drivenness is both the source and the result of best practices, especially when leveraged for scalability.
I hope this brief introduction to the written and spoken standard of Businesses has been helpful.
Stay tuned for the next installment, in which we’ll circle back to a 30,000-foot view of some blue-ocean strategies.
