Under the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, parties to a lawsuit must hand over certain categories of information at the outset — witnesses, documents they may use, damages computations, insurance coverage — without any request from the other side. Discovery in American litigation begins with a push, not a pull.
business
Regulation FD
Adopted by the SEC in August 2000 after analysts at several Wall Street firms were found receiving information before the public. The rule is simple in principle: material non-public information must go to everyone at the same time. Telling one analyst privately is prohibited, and telling one person accidentally triggers an obligation to tell everyone immediately.
Form 8-K
An American public company must file within four business days of a material event occurring — a change of control, a bankruptcy, the departure of a director, a material cybersecurity incident. Not at the quarter end, not when convenient, not when asked. Four days from the event, across more than thirty defined categories.
FYI
American email produced a three-letter abbreviation for sending information to someone who did not ask for it and need do nothing with it. It is one of the most-used abbreviations in American business correspondence. The message exists solely to transfer knowledge, and the sender writes it knowing there will be no reply.
No surprises
Stated openly by American managers as a standing instruction: I don’t like surprises, tell me early, bad news does not improve with age. The instruction concedes that the news may be bad, and asks for it anyway. What is being forbidden is not the problem but the concealment.
Verbs of pushing
Flag it. Escalate it. Socialize it. Share it out. Circulate. Cascade it down. Give me a heads up. Ping me. American business English has an unusually large set of verbs for moving information outward, and almost all of them take the holder as the subject. The holder acts.
Ask your doctor
The United States and New Zealand are the only high-income countries that permit direct-to-consumer advertising of prescription drugs. American pharmaceutical companies spent $6.58 billion on it in 2020, up more than tenfold from 1996.
The standard closing line of every one of those advertisements is an instruction to the patient: ask your doctor about it. The system is built on the assumption that the patient will raise the subject, not that the physician will.
The DRI
Directly Responsible Individual. Apple’s internal practice attaches a single name to every item on a meeting agenda, and the name is visible to everyone. American project management more broadly insists on one accountable person per item, and the phrase single throat to choke is used without embarrassment.
Owner
Product owner. Process owner. Account owner. Risk owner. Problem owner. American organizations name roles after possession of the thing rather than responsibility for a function, and the word carries the expectation that the owner acts without being asked.
Not my job
The phrase functions in American workplaces as a serious accusation rather than a statement of scope. Saying it about someone marks them as having seen a problem and stepped around it — which, in a culture where the person nearest the problem is expected to take it, is a charge of failure rather than a description of their role.