An American term of art covering salary, bonus, equity, retirement contributions and the employer’s share of insurance. The employee is encouraged to think of the whole package as one number, and comparison sites publish it that way.
business
The dinner and the golf course
American business conducts a substantial amount of its work in settings chosen because they are not offices. The point is not the food or the round. It is the hours spent in a context where people are not performing their roles.
The waiver
American processes come with a documented path around them — a variance in a building code, an exception request in procurement, a waiver in a grant programme. The exception is not a failure of the process. It is part of the process, with its own form.
The conduct of the negotiation
The conduct of the negotiation, treated as a distinct and assessable thing, separate from the outcome. A German can say a negotiation reached a good result through poor Verhandlungsführung, and the criticism stands.
The offer letter
The American job offer states base, bonus target, equity, signing bonus and start date as separate numbers. The whole of the arrangement is a set of figures, presented for negotiation.
Relationship selling
An established American sales tradition holding that the relationship precedes the transaction and outlasts it. Entire sales organisations are structured around it — account managers who keep the same clients for years, whose job description is the relationship itself.
Advantage through technology
Vorsprung durch Technik — advantage through technology — has been in use as a German advertising line since the 1970s and passed into English untranslated. The claim is that the lead comes from the engineering, not from the marketing.
The standards body
The Deutsches Institut für Normung maintains tens of thousands of standards. DIN A4 is the famous one. Most of the rest govern things nobody outside the trade has heard of.
A standard is a problem somebody already solved, written down so that nobody solves it again. It is prevention in its most literal form: the mistake is designed out before the work begins.
The handbook disclaimer
American employee handbooks carry a standard clause: this handbook is not a contract, and the employer may change any policy at any time. The document that sets out the rules opens by saying it does not bind anyone.
One-click
Amazon patented single-click ordering in 1999 and defended the patent for two decades. Removing one step from a purchase was considered valuable enough to litigate over.