Buzzwords: Influencer
In recent years, with the rise of social networking, the business world has embraced a modern form of evangelism, making the word synonymous with an entirely new brand of evangelist: the influencer.
Buzzwords: Pain Point
A problem thought to be facing a person or group of people that entrepreneurs are looking to solve through goods and/or services.
Buzzwords: Frothy
The market conditions preceding a bubble, where prices are overvalued and driven up, thanks to unsustainable demand.
Buzzwords: Scalable
An ability to invest time and energy in systems that allow small businesses to grow while still handling increased demands.
Buzzwords: Bootstrap
The process of starting a business on a shoestring budget without external help or capital. Such startups fund the development of their company through internal cash flow.
Buzzwords: Unicorn
A company, usually a tech start-up, without an established performance record, but with a stock market valuation estimated at more than $1 billion.
Buzzwords: Pivot
Generally refers to a shift in entrepreneurial approach; describes the strategy most businesses employ to find the right customer, value proposition and positioning
For this month’s column, I thought I’d reach out to people who made multi-tasking an artform and get them to explain how they so easily “pivot” from one task to another on a daily basis. But I found out that’s only one definition of pivot, and so I pivoted this column to another, more business-oriented version. (See what I did there?)
Buzzwords: Empower
To make someone stronger and more confident; to give (someone) the authority or power to do something.
The word is overused, and overuse leads to misuse. (Misuse leads to annoyance, and then we’re at a place where no one even understands or cares what you mean.)
But “empower” is not just another piece of jargon to be casually tossed around:
Buzzwords: Bandwidth
In a tweet from March 2015, Forbes magazine called bandwidth a “geeky, pretentious shorthand for available manpower,” saying it was “a gentler brushoff than ‘We literally don’t have the energy to deal right now.’”
Buzzwords: Disruption
To be disruptive now means to change things, to get people to look at something in a new light. (I’d like to go back and convince my 6-year-old self that it’s actually a good trait that got me sent to the time-out chair.)
Like all jargon, “disruption” started out well-intentioned: Who doesn’t want to be the one with the fresh vision of how things could be — not how they are?