American regulatory practice requires agencies to weigh the costs of a rule against its benefits, both in dollars, before it can be issued. Even public safety is assessed as a ratio.
Second-time founders
Silicon Valley investors are widely understood to prefer a founder whose first company failed to one who has never started a company. The failure is priced as an asset. Whatever else it produced, it produced someone who has already made the mistakes.
The failure résumé
A minor American genre: the list of rejections, failed ventures and abandoned projects, published deliberately. It only works as a gesture in a culture that reads a record of failures as evidence of attempts.
A/B testing
Show half your users one version, half the other, and let the numbers decide. No argument, no theory, no meeting. The disagreement is resolved by running both and reading the result.
The workaround
An American word for the informal route people use when the official one does not work, and it is largely neutral in tone. It is discussed openly, sometimes documented, occasionally adopted as the new official route.
Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good
Used in American business to end a discussion — specifically, a discussion about whether something is ready. The sentence casts perfectionism as an adversary, and the good-enough version as the thing under attack.
If at first you don’t succeed
Taught to American children as a rhyme, before they can evaluate whether it is true. Try, try again. The instruction is not to think harder. It is to go again.
Empowerment
An American management word, and companies built programmes around it: front-line staff authorised to resolve a problem up to a stated amount without approval. The Ritz-Carlton figure, widely reported at two thousand dollars per guest, became the standard illustration.
Trial and error
The method has a name in English, and the name contains the error as a component rather than a defect. Not trial and success. The errors are half the procedure.
Back to the drawing board
Said cheerfully. The phrase concedes that the attempt failed and moves immediately to the next one, in the same breath. There is no stage in between for assigning blame.