outsourcing

Beginner 💼 Corporate / Business

Definition

The business practice of hiring someone else to do your work, usually overseas and for less money, then acting surprised when quality and communication suffer. It's how companies cut costs while executives explain that layoffs are necessary for competitiveness, right before their bonuses arrive. Originally sold as focusing on "core competencies," it often results in nobody being competent at anything.

Example Usage

After outsourcing customer service to save money, the company spent triple that amount fixing the PR disaster from customers who couldn't understand their support team.

Source: Common business terminology

Related Terms

Beginner

firm

A fancy way to say "business" that makes your three-person startup sound like it has mahogany desks and a lobby receptionist. Whether you're a law firm, consulting firm, or accounting firm, slapping this word on your letterhead instantly adds 47% more gravitas. Fun fact: British hooligans also use it to describe their football gangs, because apparently violence needs branding too.

💼 Corporate / Business
Beginner

Deck

A PowerPoint presentation, usually containing 47 slides when only 5 were necessary. The corporate equivalent of a bedtime story, except everyone stays awake out of fear rather than interest.

💼 Corporate / Business
Intermediate

bleester

Someone with a supernatural ability to arrive exactly after all the hard work is finished, conveniently dodging effort while maintaining plausible deniability. The workplace phantom who materializes only when the moving truck is packed, the project is complete, or the cleaning is done.

💼 Corporate / Business
Intermediate

entity

The corporate lawyer's favorite word for 'thing that exists,' especially when that thing is a company, LLC, or some Frankenstein corporate structure designed to optimize taxes. In database design, it's any object you're storing information about. Basically, if it exists and you can point at it (physically or conceptually), some industry professional has probably called it an entity.

💼 Corporate / Business
Advanced

Roll The Nickels

To be in complete control of a situation, particularly regarding money and decision-making authority. The phrase implies you're the one who counts, organizes, and distributes the cash, making you the de facto boss. It's old-school slang for being the person who calls the shots because you control the purse strings.

💼 Corporate / Business
Intermediate

level set

To ensure everyone has the same (usually minimal) understanding of a situation before proceeding, often because previous meetings accomplished nothing.

💼 Corporate / Business

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