American military and business usage: a good plan executed now beats a perfect plan executed later. The claim is not that 80 percent is acceptable, but that the remaining 20 percent costs more in delay than it returns in quality.
business
The stand-up
The daily stand-up exists so that nobody sits down, because sitting down lengthens the meeting. The furniture is arranged to prevent deliberation.
The reframe
American workplace vocabulary systematically renames difficulty.
A problem is an opportunity. An obstacle is a challenge. A failure is a learning experience. A collapse is a setback, which contains the assumption that forward motion resumes.
None of these are euphemisms exactly. Each one carries a claim about what happens next.
Show me the money
From Jerry Maguire, 1996, and shouted rather than spoken. It entered American business speech immediately, because it names the moment when talk is required to convert into something countable.
What gets measured gets managed
The sentence is quoted constantly in American management and commonly attributed to Peter Drucker, though the attribution is disputed. Whatever its origin, the assumption inside it is that a thing without a number attached to it will drift.
The meeting record
The German meeting record is not a list of decisions. A proper Protokoll records what was raised, what was argued, who objected and on what grounds, and then what was resolved.
It is circulated, corrected, and approved at the next meeting as its own agenda item.
Six months later the question is not only what was decided but why. The document is built to answer the second.
The four-eyes principle
Vier-Augen-Prinzip. The four-eyes principle. Two people must see and approve, independently, before something takes effect.
It is written into German banking, pharmaceutical, administrative and corporate procedure, and it has a name of its own, which tells you it is a thing people invoke rather than a practice they happen to follow.
It does not check whether the answer is right. It checks that more than one route reached it.
Insight
The American business word for a finding worth acting on, and it has largely displaced finding, result and conclusion. An insight implies a consequence. The word itself carries the claim that something should now change.
That cannot be calculated
That cannot be calculated. A German objection to a proposal, and it is a refusal rather than a complaint. What is being said is that the thing cannot be priced, and therefore cannot be undertaken.
The named deputy
German organisations name a stellvertretender Leiter for most positions of responsibility, with the substitution written into the job description. Advancement runs through a stated apprenticeship to the role, in public, before the role is held.