11 May 2019

• Achilles' heel: A weakness or vulnerable point
• The main success for CSOs in influencing MNEs is through attacking Corporate's Achilles' heel - the brand Image. (Jenny Ahlstrom). 

16 April 2019

• Take something with a grain of salt: To understand that something is likely to be untrue or incorrect. 
• Being based on a small sample qualitative study, this finding has to be taken with a grain of salt. (Kai Hockerts).

12 July 2016

• Unfetter: Release from restrain or inhibition
• Sawatsky felt comfortable enough this summer to invite me to Bristol and offer unfettered access to his seminar. (David Folkenflik)
• Eviscerate: To take out the internal organ of an animal
• John Sawatsky methodically eviscerates the nation's most prominent television journalists. (David Folkenflik)
• Cross the Rubicon: To make a decision that cannot be changed later
• It can bridge the ever expanding void between stasis and evolution, which is precisely the Rubicon we have been struggling to cross for so many years. (Martin Binks) 

11 July 2016

• Pipe dream: Any fantastic notion, hope or story.
• Rouhani's dream to unite Muslims under the banner of Iran is a pipe dream. It will never happen. (Micah Halpern)
• Shoot from the hip: To act or speak on the matter without forethought.
• Like Trump, the Ugandan president seemed to be shooting from the hip. (Jerusalem Post)
• Fly in the face of: To act in defiance of (authority, customs etc.).  
• I also lamented our self-imposed fondness for incrementalism, which not only flies in the face of the spirit of innovation we routinely espouse but is perilously at odds with the realities of life beyond our ivory towers. (Martin Binks)

4 July 2016

• Oafish: Rough or clumsy and unintelligent.
• (Simon Critchley)
• Flake away: (For bits of something) to brake away from the whole gradually or from natural causes.
• Amidst all this madness, all these ghosts and memories of times passed, it feels like world around me is crumbling, slowly flaking away. (Fatima Bhutto) 
• Malleable: Capable of being shaped or formed, as by hammering or pressure. 
• Abilities of all kinds are profoundly malleable. (Heidi Grant Halvorson) 
• The human brain is malleable, making it hard to distinguish between activities for which humans might be fundamentally wired, and those for which our minds are simply adjusting to meet the demands of the moment. (Cal Newport in The New Yorker)  (14/11/22)
• Cultures are more malleable than people, and often we view foreignness as precisely that, something that won't change us. (Mark Fried) 21/11/22 

30 June 2016

• Trojan horse: A person or thing intended to undermine ore secretly overthrow an enemy or opponent.
• Agile is not a Trojan horse for transforming organizations- it's a frontal assault on command-and-control cultures. (Darell K. Rigby) 
•  Egregious: Outstandingly bad, shocking
• People constantly make egregious mistakes in the workplace. (HBR. July-August 2016)
• Rail against: To complain vehemently about someone or something
• Most recently we have seen the societal and political effects playing out in a volatile U.S. presidential campaign railing against a "rigged system" and preying on people's fears.  (Jeff Kehoe) 

4 June 2016

• Schmuck: 
• Run into the sand :

11 April 2016

• Rake In: To acquire large sum of money 
• In the year since Pakistani investigators raided Axact, a Karachi-based software company accused of raking in hundreds of millions of dollars with a vast Internet degree scam, Pakistani and American investigators have been busy dismantling its operations. (Declan Walsh)
• Soft-pedal : To tone or play-down; make less strong, as an idea or fact
• The leading prosecutor quit with little explanation, hitting that he had come under political pressure to soft-pedal the case. (Declan Walsh)
• Deposition: The giving of testimony under oath
• The worker, Saleem Kureshi, conducted a webcam video deposition in 2011 for the American court. (Declan Walsh)

7 April 2016

• Voracious:  Craving or consuming large quantities of food; exceedingly eager or avid
• A voracious economic system. (Guardian)
• Paper over: To gloss over, explain away, or patch up (as major difference or disparities) especially in order to maintain a semblance of unity or agreement.
• Pointing to our addiction to consumption as a clear sign we are trying to paper over our suffering, Thay suggests we should go in the opposite direction to the very heart of our pain, in order to transcend it. (Guardian)
• Ethos: The guiding beliefs of a person, group,  or organization. 
• But is it possible for business leaders to create transformation through the building of a community ethos within their companies? (Guardian)
•  I have never been in environment with so strong an ethos of service running through it. (Jim Collins-regarding West Point)

1 February 2016

• Heads-up: Warning 
• Just for heads-up; tomorrow HEC's QEC team is coming. (Dr. Imran Amin)    

27 June 2015

• Reticulated: Resembling, covered with, or having a form of a net.
• It is not a very hard thing to go off into the wilderness and kill an elephant, or white rhino, or a reticulated giraffe, or giant eland; but it is a very hard thing to get good photographs of them, and still a harder thing to cure and transport the skins and skulls of a number of such specimen. (Theodore Roosevelt) 
• Distill: To extract the essential elements of; refine; abstract
• Where does intelligence-much less wisdom-really begin? Let me distill the heart of the question: what's the difference between dumb and stupid? (Umair Haque) 
• Siphon off: To embezzle or steal something a little at a time.
• He warns, however, that London needs to realize, that Europe is " not about profiting from the free circulation of goods of your neighbors while siphoning off their fiscal base." (Thomas Piketty in FT) 
•  Stand-in: Any substitute
• Self-improvement after all can serve as a stand-in for salvation. (Ainsley O' Connell) 
• Vitality: Exuberant physical strength or mental vigor
• Roosevelt on safari burned with exuberant vitality.  (Mark Jenkins) 
• My life's work is to make the link between the way you pay attention and your vitality more obvious. (Ellen Langer- Interview Business + Strategy)
• Flail: Flounder; struggle uselessly
• Most executive know that how they respond to the challenge of sustainability will profoundly affect the competitiveness-and perhaps even the survival-of their organizations. Yet, most are flailing around, launching a hodgepodge of initiatives without overarching vision or plan. (David A. Lubin & Daniel C. Etsy)    

21 June 2015

• Thrown down the gauntlet: To challenge, to defy
• The former president seems to have thrown down the gauntlet. (Zahid Hussain-Dawn)
• Imbrication: An overlapping, as of tiles or shingles. 
• Far from being characterized by a growing externality of economy and sociality, capitalism operates through their imbrication: morality, faith, power, and emotion the distinctive qualities of human association, are interiorized into the logic of economy. (Martijn Konings)
• Unbridled: not controlled or restrained 
• Capitalism, with its unbridled appetite for expansive consumption and the production that feeds it, would be viewed as the core problem. (John A. Mathews) 

9 June 2015

• Watershed: An important period or factor that serves as a divided line.
• Charles now counted the case as a watershed in the section's development.  (HBR)
• Tour de force: An exceptional achievement by an artist, or author, or the like, that is unlikely to be equaled by that person, or anyone else; stroke of a genius
• Janet had performed an analytic tour de force smashing the case wide open in the last minutes of the class. (HBR)
• Rashomon Effect: The effect of the subjectivity of perception on recollection, by which observers of an event are able to produce substantially different but equally plausible account of it.
• Sustainability is similar to a concept in cinematography called Roshoman Effect.           (Whitfield & McNett)
• Value Proposition: (In marketing) an innovation, service, or feature intended to make a company or product attractive to customers. 
• Thought leadership has long been a cornerstone of BCG's value proposition. (BCG)
• Steve knows that successful business strategies from winning value propositions-the benefits a product offers  to a target segment of the market, along with actions that deliver those benefits. (Bill Barnett) 

5 June 2015

• Short shrift: Give (or receive) cursory attention or little time.
• Etsy, for example, is concerned that "paired with social agenda, the environment tends to get short shrift. (Dyllick & Hockerts)