In November 2022 the texting company SimpleTexting analyzed the language of more than 6.6 million US job postings on LinkedIn. The phrase “team player” appeared about 37 times per 1,000 ads.
“Proven track record” appeared about 31 times per 1,000 ads. The most frequent buzzword was “innovator,” at about 82 times per 1,000 ads.
On May 22, 2012, John Allspaw wrote about “blameless postmortems” on Etsy’s engineering blog, Code as Craft. He described a familiar cycle after a failure. The “Engineer is punished, shamed, blamed, or retrained.” Engineers then “become silent on details,” and the result is “Cover-Your-Ass” engineering.
In a blameless postmortem, the engineer gives a detailed account of what happened “without fear of punishment or retribution.” The aim is to learn how the failure happened.
Allspaw gave the method a name because, as he described it, the familiar response to failure is to name, blame and shame.
The Global Entrepreneurship Monitor surveys adults in many countries every year. In its 2024 report on the United States, 82% of Americans said starting a business is a good career choice. 19% of adults were starting or running a new business.
Among adults who saw a business opportunity, nearly 44% gave fear of failure as a reason not to act on it.
Steve Blank, who teaches at Stanford, coined the term innovation theater. It describes what happens when large companies try to copy startup culture. In 2019 he wrote about it in the Harvard Business Review, with hackathons as one example.
In his words, the result is “coffee cups, lanyards, posters, and very little output that moves the top or bottom line.”
In 2009 the federal government guaranteed $535 million in loans to Solyndra, a California maker of solar panels. In September 2011 the company filed for bankruptcy. The investigations that followed found no evidence of criminal wrongdoing or political corruption.
The failure became a political issue for years. The Energy Department’s loan program was put “on ice.” In 2021 it was still sitting on $44 billion in loans and guarantees that Congress had authorized but no one had used.
Amy Edmondson of Harvard Business School often asks executives a question. What share of the failures in your organization are truly blameworthy? “Their answers are usually in single digits–perhaps 2% to 5%.”
Then she asks how many are treated as blameworthy. “They say (after a pause or a laugh) 70% to 90%.” She reported this in the Harvard Business Review in April 2011.
In 2003 researchers surveyed Pennsylvania doctors in six specialties with a high risk of malpractice lawsuits, among them emergency medicine, general surgery and obstetrics. Of the 824 who answered, 93% said they practiced defensive medicine. They ordered extra tests, sent patients to other specialists without need, and avoided high-risk patients. The study appeared in the Journal of the American Medical Association in 2005.
In 2010 a study in Health Affairs estimated the cost of defensive medicine in the United States at $45.6 billion a year.
“Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM” is an old saying in American business. The earliest dated use found is from 1978: “No one ever got fired for buying IBM equipment.” In 1985 the Dallas Morning News already called it a “20-year-old adage.” Who first said it is unknown.
The saying is about the buyer, not the computer. Choosing the famous supplier is the safe choice for the buyer’s career. Later versions replace IBM with Microsoft or Oracle.
Every year Gallup asks Americans how much confidence they have in their institutions. In June 2025, 70% said they had a great deal or quite a lot of confidence in small business. It ranked first, ahead of the military at 62% and science at 61%. Big business stood at 15%.
In the same year, 95% of Americans said they view small business positively.
Moonshot. Merriam-Webster defines it as “an extremely ambitious project or mission undertaken to achieve a monumental goal.”
Swing for the fences. In baseball, this means to swing as hard as possible to hit a home run, which increases the chance of missing the ball. At work, it means to do something extremely ambitious, “especially rashly.”
Career-limiting move. This is an action that endangers “one’s future prospects of getting plum projects and raises, and possibly one’s job.” It is also called a CLM.