American software culture has a word for the accumulated cost of undone documentation, and it is borrowed from finance. Debt is something you take on deliberately, in order to move faster now, intending to pay it back later. Most of it is never paid back, and everyone involved knows that when they take it on.
business
Consultants
American corporations spend heavily on external advisers who arrive, learn the business, produce recommendations, and leave. A recurring complaint inside those companies is that the consultants are selling back knowledge the firm once had. The complaint is often accurate, and the spending continues.
Reinventing the wheel
The phrase exists in American English as a criticism, and it is used constantly — which means the thing it describes happens constantly. A culture only develops a ready reproach for a failure it commits often.
The OODA loop
John Boyd, a US Air Force colonel, built a model of decision-making out of his experience of air combat: observe, orient, decide, act, then repeat. His central claim was about speed — that cycling through the loop faster than your opponent is what wins, because it leaves them reacting to a situation that has already changed. As a Weapons School instructor he was nicknamed Forty Second Boyd, for his standing bet that starting from a position of tactical disadvantage he could defeat any student pilot within forty seconds.
The model spread from the Air Force into American business and sports coaching. It is a formal argument that acting quickly beats acting correctly.
The case method
Harvard Business School teaches almost entirely by case. Students are given an incomplete business situation, cold-called without warning, and required to state what they would do. Not what the considerations are — what they would do. And a substantial part of the grade is participation, so silence is penalised directly.
At-will employment
The default rule across almost all US states is that either party may end the employment relationship at any time, for any reason that is not illegal, without notice. Whatever else it does, it makes staffing decisions fast. A manager who wants to change a team can change it this week.
Just do it
Nike, 1988. Three words, an imperative, and no object — it does not say what to do. The sentence assumes the deliberation has gone on too long and supplies the only missing ingredient.
Action items
The American meeting produces action items, and a meeting that produces none is described as having gone nowhere. Not conclusions, not understandings, not positions. Items — countable, assigned, with a name next to each.
Bias toward action
Named as a virtue and used in hiring and promotion. Amazon lists it among its leadership principles: speed matters in business, and many decisions are reversible and do not need extensive study. The word bias is chosen deliberately — it concedes that the tendency is not neutral, and recommends it anyway.
Executive
The American word for a senior manager comes from execute — to carry out. Not director, not leader, not chief. The person is named after the act of doing.