If you’ve been in a meeting with a member of the Endless team recently and witnessed them feverishly scribbling on their note pad, it may be that someone has just raised a very salient point, or perhaps they have just heard a business expression worthy of being added to our ongoing series. Here we bring you the very latest in business jargon.
ADMINISTRIVIA. A term that encompasses all the trivial tasks that management is far too qualified to suffer through. “He delegated all the administrativia to the office junior and left early to play golf.”
BAMBI. Acronym for “Bloody Awful Management Buy In” which describes a MBI gone very wrong.”The acquisition turned out to be a BAMBI and the investors could not wait to get out.”
BANDWIDTH . Superb appropriation of computer speak term for the rate of data transfer, as transposed to form a comment on a person or team’s intellectual capabilities (or lack thereof). “It’s not a manpower issue, it’s a lack of Management bandwidth that’s the problem here.” See also “Horsepower."
BANNER YEAR. The best year in history for a given firm. Most likely, you're not having one of these. “I wish they stopped referring to their 2008 performance; that was clearly a banner year.”
CASCADE. Harmless, pretty sounding metaphor for the art of delegating work you don’t want to do down to the lower tiers of your organization. “Once ensconced as an audit senior, he rapidly became a master of the art of cascading business critical initiatives through the organization.”
COLOMBO. Acronym for “Colossally over-priced MBO”. “That deal was a COLOMBO; they paid an astronomical sum as the acquisition happened at the peak of the market.“
CRACKBERRY. Obsessive/Compulsive user of Blackberry handset. Note - likely to be facing imminent divorce or divorced. “He sends emails 24/7. He is such a crackberry.”
DRILL DOWN. Adopted by accountants looking to convey a client-assuring, hard edged determination on their part to relentlessly sift through numbers in mind-numbing detail. “I’ve received the forecasts, they appear reasonable at a high level (see below) but I need to drill down into the detail.”
DUCK SHUFFLER. Someone who disrupts your affairs after you've finally gotten all your 'ducks in a row'. “We had everything ready and could have completed that evening but the vendor’s lawyer is a duck shuffler!”
THE BLEEDING EDGE. Some way beyond ‘leading-edge’ and ‘cutting-edge’, this takes us several steps further into the unknown and is used to describe technology that is so advanced that is still being developed. “Apparently they have consultants working on a bleeding-edge software that will radically change their business.”
HIGH LEVEL. Term to be loftily employed in implying you’ve read something and grasped the fundamentals when in fact you’ve only glanced at the title, contents and maybe the executive summary. “I’ve reviewed the information at a high level.”
PUMP AND DUMP. Term used to describe a situation where the price of a security is artificially inflated through exaggerated promotion (“pump”) with the people responsible for the promotion disposing of their shares (“dump”) following the rise in the price of the stock. “That private investor made a fortune by pumping and dumping shares on a couple of companies.”
SPREADSHEET JOCKEY. Term used to describe people who love to analyse financial numbers and put together complicated models but their spreadsheets do not add much relevant information. “Their model looked good but was completely useless; it was put together by a spreadsheet jockey.”
THE THREE F’S. Expression sometimes used by slightly cynic lenders to refer to the three signs which indicate almost guaranteed failure of a company within six months: 1) A fountain in the foyer; 2) New flags on the headquarters’ roof; 3) A famous CEO who has won a ‘Businessman of the year’ award and suddenly thinks he is infallible.