Flag it. Escalate it. Socialize it. Share it out. Circulate. Cascade it down. Give me a heads up. Ping me. American business English has an unusually large set of verbs for moving information outward, and almost all of them take the holder as the subject. The holder acts.
Whistleblower bounties
The Dodd-Frank Act directs the SEC to pay a person who voluntarily provides original information leading to a successful enforcement action a share of the money recovered, where sanctions exceed a million dollars. Not protection from retaliation, though that exists too. Payment. The law attaches a financial reward to pushing information out.
Need to know
The phrase exists in American English and comes from military and intelligence practice, where it is a legitimate principle. Used anywhere else, it is an accusation. Describing a colleague as operating on a need-to-know basis is a criticism of that person, and they will hear it as one.
Insight
The American business word for a finding worth acting on, and it has largely displaced finding, result and conclusion. An insight implies a consequence. The word itself carries the claim that something should now change.
Tech transfer
Every substantial American research university runs an office whose function is to move findings out of the laboratory into products and companies. It has staff, a budget, patent attorneys and revenue targets. Converting knowledge into use is somebody’s full-time job with a reporting line.
Land-grant universities
The Morrill Act of 1862 gave states federal land to fund colleges teaching agriculture and the mechanic arts. Later legislation added agricultural experiment stations and the Cooperative Extension Service — agents placed in counties across the country to carry research findings directly to working farmers.
American higher education built a delivery system into its founding statute. The knowledge was required to reach the field.
Ivory tower
The American phrase for academic knowledge held apart from practical use, and it is not a compliment. It concedes that the tower contains real knowledge. The objection is to its distance from anything.
The executive summary
One page at the front, written last, containing the conclusion and the recommended decision. It exists because the person who will act on the report may not read the rest of it, and the document is designed around that possibility rather than against it.
Recommendations
An American report ends with them, and a report that ends without them is regarded as unfinished. The analysis is the middle of the document. What the reader should now do is the point of it.
The dashboard
American organizations build screens of live numbers, borrowed in name and layout from the instrument panel of a vehicle. A dashboard exists for a driver. Everything on it is there because it tells you to turn, slow down, or stop.