While the novice jargon user may stick to hoary classics like proactive or think outside the box, a select subset of management types are able to insinuate the following phrases into workaday conversation with little effort. Caution is advised when handling these expressions— inexperienced users are likely to generate bafflement instead of the desired veneer of insidery expertise.
- at the coal face: working at the leading edge, i.e. in a directly customer-facing role
- build the church for Easter: to structure or invest in something for the most extreme use case; this relies on the fact that in increasingly nominal Christian societies Easter is one of two occasions in the year, the other being Christmas, in which church attendance is still normative
- burn the furniture to stay warm: to undertake actions in periods of extreme distress that, while they may ameliorate the situation, virtually guarantee that once the situation has passed the institution will be unable to function normally
- chalking the field: to establish the parameters under which a certain set of actions will subsequently take place; from analogy to preparing a sports field for play by marking boundary lines, goal areas, etc.
- coin-operated (adj): generally unsavory implication that someone is avaricious, by analogy to vending machines, which only produce output in response to the introduction of money, and then only if exact payment is made
- hayfire: a phenomenon that appears or takes effect extremely rapidly but dissipates with similar speed, similar to a fire ignited in hay, which flares brightly for a moment but quickly burns itself out, as in “Don’t worry about the media interest in our CEO change, this is just a hayfire”
- long pole through the tent: the final and most complex step required to complete a specific task, and upon which the form of the entire structure depends
- prewire: to establish the relationships, networks, meetings, data sources, etc., that will be necessary to successfully execute an upcoming initiative or project
