Innovation, innovative, innovatively: 1. Something new. 2. Nastily over-used word to describe any half-baked idea; one half of the classic tautological howler “new innovation” (literal meaning: “new new thing”); old idea hastily pulled out of a dusty bottom drawer; random thought in the shower; re-hash of previously-rejected proposal. (see Idea, big; Initiatives; Mission statement; Values)
Mission statement:
Mission statement: 1. Declaration of what a company does, or intends to do, or stands for. 2. Hackneyed bundle of weasel words and cliché; wishful thinking checklist of desired characteristics, most of which will never materialize; formulaic tick box of attributes usually including “world class”, “exceeding customer expectations”, “innovative”, “passionate” and other such drivel, none of it accurate. (see Expectations, exceeding, failing to achieve, living up to, managing, meeting; Innovation, innovative, innovatively; Passion, passionate; Values; Vision, visioning; Voodoo, corporate; World-beating, -changing; World class)
World class:
World class: 1. As good as any comparable product or service in the world. 2. Almost certainly nothing of the sort; decidedly average; impossible to measure, since no satisfactory metric of “world class” has ever been developed. (see Challenger brand; Market-leading; Mission statement; Scalable; Thought leadership; World-beating, -changing)
Pushing the envelope:
Pushing the envelope: 1. Move a piece of stationery across the table; push the boundaries of what is possible, from the aeronautics jargon referring to graphs of aircraft tolerance. 2. Another cracker from the kit box of oleaginous executives who wished they had become a Top Gun pilot but never had the skill; notional envelope used to denote Mach number or speed ratio a pilot or plane can endure before passing out or self-destructing; ludicrously applied to the world of business, populated as it is by flabby, Terylene-suited men slumped in warehouses, rather than an elite squad of finely-tuned pilots. (see Crash and burn; Flying unstable; Maxed out; Needle, moving the; Needle, pushing the; Wheels coming off)
Box, think outside the, try and put a ______ round that one:
Box, think outside the, try and put a ______ round that one: 1. Nine-dot matrix game usually called the Gottschaldt figurine, which challenges the solver to join all nine dots with four lines without removing the pen from the paper – it can only be solved by taking the lines outside the perceived square, hence the phrase. 2. Hackneyed piece of nonsense used as a euphemism for having a perfectly average thought; plaintive plea for originality that is almost never answered; all-round conspiracy designed to convince one and all that everyone is rather intelligent. (see Blue-sky thinking)