to achieve an objective using entirely disproportionate means, disregarding the sensitivities of the task and often risking collateral damage; synonymous with use a sledgehammer to crack a nut, both phrases evoke the ponderous swing of a brute force tool and the mess left behind by someone whose zeal exceeds his judiciousness1; an inverse variant is death by a thousand paper cuts, which refers to the eventual collapse of an initiative or institution through the cumulative effect of numerous irritating but individually underwhelming blows; were this entry to continue explicating this jargon much further it would risk becoming an example of the very thing being defined

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to utilize something, out of desperation or shortsightedness, that should rightly be preserved to enable later growth or success; in a business context often refers to redirecting investments that would have ensured future revenues to plug short-term needs, undermining the company’s ability to stay relevant and/or solvent in the long term

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a particular area of competence or expertise where one can expect to excel, often due to extensive experience; typically used as a self-situated metaphorical place, as in “Let me handle the negotiations with the Brazilian team, I lived in São Paulo for three years so it’s in my wheelhouse”; the word refers to the control room of a ship, presumably alluding to the authority and mastery contained within, although the average business user has no inkling of the term’s nautical connotations; in common usage prepositions may be omitted entirely, leading to expressions such as “That data analysis was rough, it’s definitely not my wheelhouse”

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to perform an action whose effects will be negligible in comparison to broader forces at work, and will be difficult or impossible to accurately measure, as in “We don’t need to send someone to Times Square to shill for Hamilton,1 that’s like watering the grass in a thunderstorm”; used to highlight the futility of a proposed course of action and dissuade the hearer from further considering it; the length2 and obscure intent of this phrase conspire to render it exceedingly rare in actual usage, as jargon users tend to favor more jocund terms used in backslapping fashion

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a frantic period of work generally triggered unexpectedly and requiring immediate resolution, taking precedence over other activities which may be dropped midstream; can be used more deviously to obtain periods of unaccountability while remaining mum on specifics, as in, “I’ll be out all morning, we’re dealing with a bunch of fire drills”; as with much jargon this phrase is no longer congruent with its real-world origin, which refers to a mere simulation of an actual emergency and is usually planned in advance

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(verb) to ensure that figures agree with each other or reflect accurate arithmetic; used in reference to multiple figures provided in the same analysis, as in: “Let’s make sure all the numbers in the document foot, they didn’t add up last time”; this jargon is a truncation of “footnote” and trades on vague associations with the word, specifically that sources are contained therein, and that the presence of a footnote implies a level of analytical rigor that merits the placement of one

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the roles and working arrangements of a group that will be used for carrying out a specific task, as in: “Let’s regroup after the intro meeting so we can set our flying formation for the next two weeks”; derived from parlance common in the military, this phrase can evoke the high-stakes precision of air force jets executing a nighttime sortie, but also the lower-stakes whimsy of a circling flock of Canadian geese deciding which airport runway looks most appealing as a landing area1

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(verb, extremely obscure) to approach an answer or other desired endpoint in a slow, roundabout way, similar to following the whorls of a nautilus shell that gradually near and eventually reach the center; can be desirable or not, depending on context; effective usage of this term requires a mutual familiarity with cephalopod anatomy that is unlikely to be present in most business contexts

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closely related to, and often indistinguishable from, drill down, this term indicates that a more rigorous or comprehensive examination should be conducted in a particular area, as in “We’ll need to do a deep dive on the debt structure before we can finalize the valuation”; depending on the depths in question it can indicate that someone is about to do a lot more work; variants include double down, and the less intensive double-click

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(verb) to make trivial or aesthetic edits to a text that may only subtly change the meaning, if at all; generally engaged in by higher-ranking colleagues who have little of substance to add but wish to put their idiosyncratic stamp on a document or to be seen as contributors, perhaps to validate their own sense of being indispensable; incorrectly implies that one is a craftsman on the order of a blacksmith or goldsmith; sadly, wordsmithing rarely involves the deletion of jargon

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