a graph or slide featuring a thoughtless jumble of dense text or objects, poor layout, hard-to-read color schemes, etc., such that comprehending the information and grasping the intended message is difficult; used to draw attention to these flaws without being overly derogatory, as in “I’ll admit this breakdown of GDP by country is a bit of an eye chart but I wanted to fit the whole world on one page”; named for the routine eye examination tool in which those being tested are required to identify increasingly inscrutable letters or symbols to gauge their visual acuity; in lieu of presenting such a chart, the reader would be well advised to spend the time crafting a graphic that is more likely to be understood

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the ability to endure or sustain performance for meaningful periods of time, or to accomplish a desired objective; the term itself is neutral and can be used to describe something positive (“That old promotional campaign really has legs, it’s been boosting sales for the past three quarters) or negative (“We’re going to have to close out last year’s model, it just doesn’t have the legs”); perhaps from association with horse racing or athletics, in which the ability to maintain speed despite getting tired towards the end of a longer race was associated metonymically with the legs themselves

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an informal figure, usually relating to a valuation or price of some kind, which is not officially shared in order to preserve negotiating flexibility and leverage; it is nonetheless floated quietly among select parties in order to test the waters for a potential transaction, as in “I know they said they don’t want to talk selling price yet, but what’s the whisper number?”; in its original Wall Street usage the term refers to estimates of earnings that are privately known by financial insiders before the public release of corporate reports

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a description applied to something that is uninspiring, ineffective, underwhelming, or otherwise below reasonable expectations and/or not as good as comparable items, as in “I thought the keynote presentation would be a hit but those new products they introduced were weak sauce”; draws an analogy to a hot sauce that fails to provide the expected levels of spiciness, making it unsuitable for its intended purpose; as with several other examples of jargon (goat rodeo, push back, watch-out, etc.) speakers use this term to soften the harshness of something potentially negative; never to be used with an article, the grammatically unusual usage further heightens its impact: “that’s weak sauce” is correct, while “that’s a weak sauce” is not

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a meandering path that has only a tangential connection to the issue at hand; if pursued it will derail a group from its core task or objective, and so the term is usually invoked as a gentle reminder to stay focused, as in “We could try to model the macroeconomic factors at play, but let’s not go down that rabbit trail”; from the notion that rabbits’ movements are chaotic with no regular or predictable structure, such that following them requires excessive effort with low probability of actually finding one; alternative version is rabbit hole, used interchangeably

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a phrase describing a phenomenon where changes to one element are likely to have rippling or unpredictable effects on others, usually in the context of an analytical model with nested or interlocking parts, as in “We could change the market share assumption, but that’s going to have an accordion effect on the rest of the numbers”; derives from the movements of an accordion while it is being played, where the bellows expands and contracts dynamically in response to squeezing movements from both halves of the instrument; the term originates in physics and engineering, where a common use is to describe the bunching and slowing of groups of vehicles as they proceed down a road

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to be thrust suddenly into a position of greater responsibility due to some corporate machination, scandal, resignation, or the like that unexpectedly removes an incumbent from his or her position, leaving the one promoted to quickly fill the void; such events can blow up carefully laid succession plans and frustrate others who had hoped to assume the role under more typical circumstances; those who receive such promotions may be chosen for proximity or expediency more than merit; from the idea that leaders with authority over soldiers in battle would need to be quickly replaced were they to become casualties, so as to avoid leaving a platoon rudderless

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a very rarely-used term that means to be skewed, slightly inaccurate, or in need of some minor adjustment, as in “I think the presentation of those user statistics should be torqued towards our top customers, we want the conclusions to really pop”; adapted from the more common understanding of torque as twisting or rotation, or in more precise terms a force applied perpendicularly to a radius; part of a long and inglorious tradition of co-opting scientific terms for usage in business contexts where they appear superficially relevant, as with titrate, optics, and calibrate

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to check status or seek rapid feedback from another party, generally for a discrete and often time-sensitive reason; adopted from the computer networking term in which one machine sends a signal to another to verify operating status, generating a standardized response from the receiver; used in an attempt to give a technical sheen to something that would otherwise be quotidian, as in “I’ll ping Adrian tomorrow to check how the draft report is going”; related to tickle, which is a similar brief communication oriented to subtly ensuring that progress is being made

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a condition that requires work in a particular area to cease completely, due to a deadline, external circumstance, an injunction from a superior, etc.; derives from the era of standardized tests administered on paper, during which students were strictly required to put down their writing implements upon the elapsing of a fixed time period; suited to analytically-heavy contexts, as in “We have to get the valuation data today because it’s pencils down tomorrow once the executive team arrives”; this term is the opposite of hands on keys, a more technologically current exhortation to continue working

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