Boil the ocean meaning: trying to do everything

Boil the ocean meaning in a meeting

“Let’s not boil the ocean” asks for a smaller job before anyone starts on the big one. It gets said about an audit of every system when three of them broke, a survey with 90 questions, or a site redesign to fix one form. Of all the corporate jargon for trimming work, it’s the most dramatic. Nobody has ever been told not to boil a pond.

It usually travels with move the needle: do enough to change the result, then stop.

Who says it to whom

Aimed at a plan, the phrase is fair. It turns into a red flag when it kills a careful idea with no reason given. It’s a worse one when it comes from the person who wrote the brief that asked for everything. Ask which part to drop. Whatever survives the cut is what they care about.

Job ads that boil the ocean

Job ads boil the ocean without ever using the phrase. One hire is to run the systems, write the reports, look after the customers and handle other duties as assigned. The ad calls that wearing many hats. Sometimes it calls the hire a rockstar or a ninja. Both are funny job titles, and both come with one salary.

The stricter ads add that the right person already knows the internal tools, needs no onboarding and works at full speed from day one. That person exists. They already work there, and the ad was written around them. The Application, a job application game, piles its demands on in the same way, one rule at a time.

A Slack reply with boil the ocean in it

#data-team, Wednesday 11:03 am

Love the plan to rebuild every dashboard, but let’s not boil the ocean do all 47 at once. Can we fix the revenue one the board reads first, and look at the other 46 in January?

The Will Rogers story

A story hands Will Rogers, and sometimes Mark Twain, a joke about German U-boats in the First World War: boil the ocean and they’ll have to come up. Nobody has found a source for it. Twain died in 1910, four years before the war began, so the U-boats were never his problem.

Where the office phrase came from is unknown. One major dictionary has no entry for it at all. Another has a single example, from ABC News in 2010. For a phrase about taking on too much, it left very little paperwork.

Who understands it

Ask UK workers to explain 24 office phrases with no looking up allowed, and 9.2% get boil the ocean. Only ideate does worse, at 4.3%. In the US, 22% of Gen Z can say precisely what it means. Asked for their own version, Gen Z office workers wrote “aim too high”. Three words, no ocean.

Executives like it

In the study behind the Corporate Bullshit Receptivity Scale, the executives kept coming back to two water phrases: boiling the ocean and swim lanes. The study mixed real quotes from business leaders with sentences a program had strung together from buzzwords. A corporate bullshit generator runs the same trick, minus the executives.