Business-ese has become an effective way of distilling complex theories into a more palatable portion. Here are twenty-five of the latest buzzwords that will help you with your “systems thinking” as you strive to become part of the “knowledge sector.”
1. Benchmark: evaluating an organization’s performance by comparing itself to a peer organization.
2. Clean slate: the notion that process improvement starts not with where you are now, but with a blank slate.
3. Corporate anorexia: the dispirited and overworked organization remaining after down-sizing and exodus of their talented and mobile people.
4. Corporate culture: an explicit set of values shared broadly and deeply by people within the company that bonds them together.
5. Empowerment: increasing employee involvement to stimulate initiative and entrepreneurship.
6. Fail forward: failing fast and learning from it so as to make the next and smarter step quickly.
7. Groupware: software that allows companies to streamline business processes, compelling organizations to rethink the way people work.
8. Holistic approach: redefining the entire business process, not just a single function or department.
9. Human dynamics: the framework for understanding people and realizing their potential within an organization.
10. Interdisciplinary: shifting organizational responsibility to enable people to serve customers better and with more cross-training of specialized skills.
11. Lateral thinking: seeking to solve problems by unorthodox means, “outside of the box.”
12. Leverage points: some aspect of a process where small improvements will produce a positive impact on overall performance.
13. Mobilization: the process by which a company and its people are brought to the point where they accept the changes that re-engineering entails.
14. Outside-in approach: defining issues and sorting solutions from the customer’s perspective.
15. Paradigm: a model, standard, or ideal to follow as an example.
16. Purposeful impatience: applauding the new, rough cut ideas and questioning even good performance that involves no bold moves or fast-paced experiments.
17. Re-engineering: the fundamental rethinking and radical redesign of business processes to bring about dramatic improvements in performance.
18. Results-focused: setting specific targets to improve customer service and profitability.
19. Road kill: image for companies that fail to anticipate the future of their industry and are mowed down by the competition.
20. Self-developer: an individual who values independence, dislikes bureaucracies and seeks to balance work with other priorities like family and recreation.
21. Synergy: cooperative interaction among groups or merged parts of a corporation that creates an enhanced combined effect.
22. TCR: (Total Customer Responsiveness) attaching your organization to your customer and moving aggressively to create new markets for them.
23. Value-adding: adding something of importance to the customer that they need, want, and are willing to pay for, that will help the organization maintain differentiation.
24. Voluntary downshifting: the current trend of workers choosing lateral or downward moves in favor of more family time.
25. Wild ducks: innovative employees, usually hired from outside, who have a fresh perspective on the company’s management strategy, business, and customers.