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A Field Guide To Business Jargon, And What Actually Gets The Job Done In The Hudson Valley
By Mike Oates
I have sat in a lot of meetings. Conference rooms in Poughkeepsie, boardrooms in White Plains, a diner booth in Kingston that doubled as a strategy session. And somewhere along the way I noticed that the business world has quietly developed its own language, one that sounds impressive, feels productive, and occasionally means nothing at all.
So, in the spirit of “adding value,” allow me to offer a field guide.
Let’s start with the granddaddy of them all: “thinking outside the box.” In more than three decades, I have never seen the box. Nobody has. Yet we are constantly urged to think outside it, which raises the question of who put us inside it in the first place. My theory is that the box is a conference room, and the fastest way to think outside it is to go talk to a customer.
“Let’s blue-sky it.” This means we are about to have a conversation with no budget, no deadline, and no one taking notes. It is the business equivalent of a snow day. Blue-sky sessions are enjoyable, and I recommend them, right up until someone asks, “So who’s doing this?” At which point the sky clouds over and everyone studies their shoes.
“How do we scale it?” is the question most frequently asked about things that do not work yet. Scaling is wonderful. It is also step nine. Steps one through eight involve making one customer happy, then a second, and then discovering that the second one wants something completely different.
“Let’s take this offline.” Translation: this conversation has become uncomfortable, and I would like it to happen somewhere I am not. Its close cousin is “Let’s put a pin in it,” which is where good ideas go to be forgotten with dignity.
“Circle back.” I have been circling back for most of my career. It is a good thing I like the scenery.
“Low-hanging fruit.” Everybody wants it. Nobody has ever found any. By the time you hear this phrase, the fruit has been picked, eaten, and the tree cut down for lumber. Also in the produce section: “Let’s not boil the ocean,” which is sound advice, though I have never met anyone who was planning to.
Then there is the lightning round. “Synergy.” “Bandwidth.” “Move the needle.” “Deep dive.” “Best practices.” “Pivot.” “Disrupt.” “Leverage,” used as a verb. “Ping me.” “Let’s socialize this.” “Run it up the flagpole.” “It is what it is.” “Net-net.” And “going forward,” which, as far as I can tell, is the only direction time has ever gone.
My personal favorite is “Let’s unpack that,” which I have concluded is what you say when you would like someone else to do the talking for a while.
Now, a confession. I use every one of these. Probably weekly. Some of them are useful shorthand, and I would wager half the people reading this have said “circle back” since breakfast. Jargon is not a crime. It is a habit, and a fairly harmless one, right up to the moment we mistake the words for the work.
Because here is what I have learned from watching businesses across the Hudson Valley’s nine counties, from family manufacturers in Orange County to life-science startups in Westchester to farm operations in Columbia County that now ship across the Northeast: nobody has ever synergized their way to a payroll.
The businesses that succeed here do the unglamorous things. They prepare. They know their numbers cold before they walk into the bank. They make the extra phone call. They train the new hire personally instead of “onboarding” them with a PDF. And when they innovate, and they do, constantly, it rarely looks like a whiteboard covered in sticky notes. It looks like a shop owner who noticed what customers kept asking for and quietly started making it. It looks like a machinist who spent a weekend reading up on a supply chain nobody in the county was serving yet. In the real world, creativity is usually wearing work boots.
And they are relentlessly results-driven, not in the “key performance indicator” sense but in the “did we ship it, did the customer come back, did we make payroll on Friday” sense. Those are the only needles that ever really move.
This is what makes the Hudson Valley such a good place to build something. We have world-class colleges and universities, an airport at Stewart that is growing into a true regional gateway, a location an hour from the largest market in the country, and a culture that still values doing over describing. Our employees show up. Our managers roll up their sleeves. Our entrepreneurs have a healthy suspicion of anyone who uses “ideate” in a sentence.
So here is my modest proposal. Keep the jargon if you like it. But every time you say “let’s circle back,” actually circle back. Every time you propose to “scale it,” first make sure it works once. Every blue-sky session should end with a name, a date, and a task. And when someone asks you to think outside the box, consider stepping outside the building instead. The customers are out there, and they will tell you exactly what to do.
At the end of the day (sorry), business has never been about slogans. It is about hard work, preparation, real creativity, and results you can count. The Hudson Valley has all four in abundance. Let’s leverage that.
Net-net, I mean.
Mike Oates is President and CEO of the Hudson Valley Economic Development Corporation (HVEDC), the regional economic development organization serving Westchester, Putnam, Dutchess, Rockland, Orange, Ulster, Sullivan, Greene, and Columbia counties. He is headquartered in Poughkeepsie and can be reached at moates@hvedc.com.
