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The vocabulary of results

Results-oriented. A standard phrase on an American résumé. The claim is not that the person works hard or knows the field, but that they can be judged by what came out.

Deliverables. American project language names the output as the unit of work. Not tasks, not effort, not hours. The thing handed over.

Track record. Not qualifications, not references, not what someone believes about themselves. What has already been produced, and can be pointed at.

Best practice. Methods are adopted from a competitor, another industry, another country, on the grounds that they work. There is no loyalty in the concept — the practice earns its place by outcome and loses it the same way.

Return on investment. Every expenditure becomes a candidate for the calculation, including training, meetings, research and attention. The question is not whether the thing is good. It is what came back.

Figures of speech

The bottom line. An accounting term — the last line of the statement, where profit or loss appears — that became the general American word for the thing that finally matters. Everything above it is detail.

The proof of the pudding is in the eating. Not the recipe, not the cook’s reputation, not how it looks coming out of the oven.

If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Popularized by Bert Lance in the Carter administration. A working thing requires no examination of why it works.

Whatever works. Offered as a resolution rather than a shrug. It closes a debate about approach by declining to have one.

Don’t tell me, show me. An objection to the form of an answer rather than its content. Description is treated as insufficient in principle, whatever it describes.

Process for process’s sake

Checking the box. Going through the motions. Paperwork exercise. Compliance theater. Four American expressions for procedure performed without purpose, and all four are dismissive. The vocabulary for hollow process is far richer than the vocabulary for good process.

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 process get in the way

Said in American meetings, openly, by senior people, and it is not heard as an attack on the organisation. The sentence assumes a hierarchy in which the outcome outranks the procedure, and assumes everyone in the room agrees.

The commission

American sales roles are frequently paid mostly or entirely on commission, with no ceiling. The earnings are a direct function of output, and the arrangement is regarded as motivating rather than insecure.

Red tape

The American term for procedure that has stopped serving anything, and it is never neutral. Politicians campaign on cutting it. Agencies publish counts of rules eliminated. The metaphor is of something that binds without holding anything together.

Deadlines

The word deadline was first used during the American Civil War to describe a line which, if a prisoner crossed it, could result in the prisoner’s death. Even though most deadlines today won’t end in murder, Americans still feel that correlation when talking about a deadline, and they tend to treat it like a life-or-death matter.

Deadline: a line drawn within or around a prison that a prisoner passes at the risk of being shot; a date or time before which something must be done; the time after which copy is not accepted for a particular issue of a publication. First known use was in 1864.

Examples: She worked on her composition right up until the deadline. We had to hurry to meet the deadline. The project was completed a week past its deadline. The deadline for submitting college applications is April 19th. They’re working under a deadline.

Deadlines and recovery from missed deadlines are so important to Americans that many job interviewers specifically ask applicants to describe a time that they missed a deadline and how they recovered from it. If you type missed deadline into Google, you’re immediately bombarded with self-help websites describing how to recover from a missed deadline.

In 2013, the Prince George’s County school system lost $1.4 million of state funds when it failed to approve school construction contracts within their two year deadline. Although the school district was very close to approving these contracts, no extension was given, and the money had to be returned.

How fast?

The American tendency to work at a fast pace and aim for rapid results continues to confound Germans. They have difficulty identifying a logical and structured plan for action amongst their business dealings, and where Americans see hard work and flexibility in action, they suspect only chaos. When Germans feel overrun by American ‘decisionism’ and see their standards of quality and the rhythm of their own style of working as becoming endangered, this confusion can quickly transform into irritation.

“A bad decision is better than no decision.” There are few Americans likely to disagree with this popular saying. Germans, however, would tend towards saying the exact opposite. Sometimes even a good decision will find no supporters.

From the American perspective, it is the client who is the most significant factor in determining the deadline for a given decision. Americans value a client-oriented business model. Because Americans tend to operate under the assumption that this same dynamic exists in in Germany as well, they find it difficult to understand why their German colleagues would risk upsetting a customer over time wasted during the decision-making process.

Priorities and time factors can change during the process of making any decision. Americans prefer to divide this process up into multiple sub-processes or steps. The sequence of these steps must remain flexible – meaning that it should be possible to change their order, or even skip a step or two in between if necessary. From this point of view, the structured discipline of the German decision-making process can appear exceedingly rigid and in-flexible – occasionally appearing as though it would directly conflict with the purpose of the decision itself.

It is almost as though the decision-making process would be more important than the final decision. To Americans, the German approach of assigning so much importance to the process of making a decision as to possibly loose perspective of the final decision itself can seem rather paradoxical. For this reason, one might suspect that simple indecision is being masked by a seeming concern for ‘attention to detail’.

Of course the German understandings of process and customer relations play a role here (according to the motto: ‘The client wants a solution from us. Our processes guarantee a solution, so the client knows that he can wait.’) But surely there must be something more involved; Germans can see that during the process of making an important decision one must also make a series of decisions which are smaller, but not insignificant to the bigger picture. These decisions are key elements of a systematic (or self-perpetuating) approach, each de facto requiring more time for consideration.

Ultimately, whether or not the rebounding American approach – making quick decisions, then revising them just as quickly – is actually faster typically depends on the related events. ‘Wir haben mit Äpfeln und Birnen zu tun’ – you can’t compare apples and oranges (or pears). Nevertheless, there will always be those colleagues who will continue do do so, and continue to bicker.

Navel-gazing

Useless or excessive self-contemplation; self-absorption, self-centeredness, self-concern, self-interest, self-involvement, self-preoccupation, self-regard. Navel-gazing.

Too much self. Too little other. Self being the process, how the work is done. Other being those who should benefit from the work to be done, the output, the product or service.

The deeper Germans discuss and debate how the work is done – process – the more their American colleagues fear a turn from the outward to the inward. The link is lost between process (how the work is done) and the results.

Americans often have the sense that their German counterparts believe that process can solve any problem, address any challenge, even those which do not lend themselves to process. Leadership. Decision making. Business relationships. Process works with the measurable, the quantifiable, but less so to the immeasurable, the unquantifiable.

For Americans, process is a tool. Apply where applicable.