Jargon

a baffling term used to indicate unavailability, although the nature or owner of said pocket remains unknown; perhaps developed through mistaken conflation of ‘out of town’ with the standard phrase ‘out of pocket,’ which indicates expenses borne personally; in a…

(verb) additional revenues prospectively or actually gained over a baseline condition, as in “The new Asia strategy should lead to at least fifty million in uplift”; used somewhat evasively when the frank mention of lucre would be unseemly, thus attempting…

(verb) to put firm boundaries on the period that will be spent on a certain task, with the implication that the necessary work can be finished within this allotment or that schedule adherence is more critical than completion, as in: “Bill,…

to cause a random or archaic process, approach or system to become formally adopted or codified; stems from the folklore that street patterns in certain towns (e.g., Boston) were developed by paving the tracks worn into the earth by the…

to figuratively remove those constraints which narrow one’s field of vision, leading one to consider an issue in its entirety without assuming that current or historical limitations hold sway; the phrase originates from the practice of blocking a horse’s peripheral…

a term used to indicate the ultimate result, sum up a meandering conversation, or introduce a note of finality to one’s point; derives from the accounting term in which net profits are the final line on an income statement after…

to quickly check the status of a particular activity, often to ensure that appropriate progress has been made, as in “Let’s do a dipstick on the report this evening and see how far we’ve come”; derives from the process used…

to embark on a course of action that so damages existing capabilities or relationships that future success is hindered, as in “Don’t penalize the whole company just because the Western division didn’t make its numbers, let’s not salt the earth here…

a casual heuristic used to indicate rough estimates in a limited set of categories, usually small, medium, and large, as in: “We can’t do a full bottom-up evaluation of each market segment, just use t-shirt sizing for now”; derived from the practice…

discrete tasks that are to be accomplished in fairly rapid fashion, as in: “I don’t think I’ll make that meeting this afternoon Phil, we’ve got a bunch of snakes to kill”; has the benefit of evoking the vague danger and…