subcontract

Definition

The art of delegating work you've been contracted to do to someone else, while maintaining plausible involvement and a comfortable margin. It's essentially corporate inception: contracts within contracts. Companies use this to claim expertise in everything while actually doing very little themselves.

Example Usage

We'll need to subcontract the electrical work since our team specializes in saying we can do electrical work.

Source: Business terminology via Dictionary definitions

Related Terms

Beginner

compliance

The corporate practice of following an endless maze of rules, regulations, and legal requirements so you don't get sued, fined, or shut down by angry regulators. It's the department everyone loves to hate until the auditors show up, at which point compliance officers become the most popular people in the building. Think of it as corporate adulting—tedious, expensive, but absolutely necessary if you want to stay in business.

💼 Corporate / Business

Advanced

Vern Dogging

The corporate art of surveillance without subtlety, where a manager or supervisor watches you so obviously that they might as well be taking notes on a clipboard. Unlike bird-dogging, this comes with an extra helping of intimidation and the distinct feeling that someone's building a case against you.

💼 Corporate / Business

Beginner

cascade

The process of distributing information, decisions, or directives down through organizational hierarchy levels, typically ensuring that everyone hears the message third-hand and slightly distorted, like corporate telephone.

💼 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

Advanced

delimitation

The act of drawing boundaries or limits around something, whether it's a research scope, territorial borders, or the precise extent of your responsibilities before they become someone else's problem. In academia and business, it's how you politely tell stakeholders 'this is what we're doing, and everything else is out of scope.' Think of it as the corporate version of building a fence, but with more documentation and fewer property disputes.

💼 Corporate / Business

Intermediate

realigned

What happens when the first alignment didn't work out, requiring a strategic do-over. Whether it's organizational restructuring, shifting company priorities, or admitting the original plan was garbage, realignment is corporate-speak for 'we need to try this again.' It's alignment's second chance at making everything work together.

💼 Corporate / Business

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