Corporate jargon starting with B
50 terms of corporate jargon starting with B, from B2B to buyer persona. Bandwidth is time, and a bio break is a toilet break.
Every term under B
B
- B2B
- selling to businesses
- Business to business: companies selling to other companies.
- B2C
- selling to the public
- Business to consumer: selling straight to people, not companies.
- back-to-back
- no gap
- Meetings one after another with no break between.
- backfill
- replace
- Hire someone into a role left empty.
- backlog
- to-do pile
- The list of work waiting to be done.
- balls in the air
- many tasks
- Many tasks going at once, none of them finished.
- bandwidth
- time
- Time or energy for more work, usually mentioned when there isn't any.
- bare minimum Mondays
- a slow Monday
- Doing only the essential work on Mondays, to ease into the week.
- Creator Marisa Jo Mayes gets the credit for it.
- baseline
- starting point
- The starting measure that later results are compared with.
- BAU
- normal work
- Business as usual: the routine work, not the project.
- BCC
- hidden copy
- Blind carbon copy: a reader the other recipients cannot see.
- bell curve
- forced ratings
- Ranking staff so most score average and a few score low.
- bells and whistles
- extra features
- Features added for show more than need.
- bench strength
- ready successors
- How many people could step into key roles.
- benchmark
- compare against
- Compare your results with others' or with a standard.
- best-in-class
- the best
- Better than anything else of its kind, according to its makers.
- best practice
- the usual way
- The method most people recommend, often because other people use it.
- bias for action
- act fast
- Preferring to act quickly over waiting for perfect information.
- In bowls, a bias was extra weight on one side of a ball that made it curve; by the 1570s it also meant a one-sided leaning of the mind.
- big ask
- large favor
- A request that is a lot to expect.
- big picture
- overall view
- The whole situation without the details, usually because the details are bad.
- bio break
- toilet break
- A short break in a long meeting, named as politely as possible.
- bleeding edge
- untested
- Newer than cutting edge, and more likely to break.
- bleisure
- business plus holiday
- Adding leisure days to a business trip.
- blue ocean
- no competitors
- A new market with no rivals yet.
- boilerplate
- standard text
- Standard wording reused from document to document.
- boondoggle
- pointless junket
- A trip or project that wastes money and achieves little.
- boots on the ground
- staff on site
- People doing the actual work, where it happens.
- boreout
- burnout from boredom
- Exhaustion from work that is dull and too easy.
- Peter Werder and Philippe Rothlin named it in their 2007 book Diagnose Boreout.
- bossware
- spy software
- Software that tracks what employees do on their computers.
- bottom line
- profit
- Profit after every cost, or the one point that matters in the end.
- bottom-up
- from the staff
- Coming from the people doing the work, then going upward.
- brain dump
- tell me everything
- Writing or saying everything you know about something, unsorted.
- brainstorm
- idea session
- A meeting where everyone throws out ideas, judged later.
- break down the silos
- share information
- Make separate teams share what they know.
- bring your whole self to work
- be yourself, within reason
- Invited to be fully yourself at work, within HR's limits.
- broetry
- one line per sentence
- A post written one sentence per line, so you have to click see more.
- Marketer Josh Fechter spread the format on LinkedIn in late 2017.
- brown bag
- lunch talk
- An informal talk over lunch, the lunch usually your own.
- brownfield
- building on the old
- A project that must work with existing systems.
- burn rate
- spending speed
- How fast a company spends its cash.
- burning platform
- change or die
- A crisis used to push people into change.
- burnout
- worn out
- Exhaustion from long stress at work.
- business casual
- smart, no tie
- A dress code between a suit and jeans, defined by nobody.
- busywork
- pointless tasks
- Work that fills time without achieving much.
- buy-in
- agreement
- People's agreement to support a plan.
- buyer persona
- made-up typical customer
- A profile of an imagined typical customer, with a name.
Before B: A. After B: C. All letters: corporate jargon.