We’ve all heard the term “bubble” in reference to an investing fever fueled by speculation in what participants erroneously perceive to be an infinitely rising curve of valuation. The dot-com “bubble” and the recent real estate “bubble” being modern examples of what Alan Greenspan referred to as “irrational exuberance”. We would be wise to be on the lookout for the next such bubble. But where did this term come from?
Globalization is a term that has come to mean negative things, for some reason. I’m not exactly sure when it started, but sometime in the last ten years or so, a concept that used to be viewed as beneficial somehow came to represent oppression, confinement, intolerance of diversity, condensation of power and exploitation. While I think these horrendous realities are indeed of concern, and do occur within the context of human behavior around the world, I don’t think they are the result of global trends that are typically inferred by the word “globalization”.
It seems that much of the business language we hear (and use) is hard to understand. The Rosetta Stone of business jargon hasn’t been discovered which would allow translation to an easily understood form. I love to study jargon, “terms of art” and language which are unique to the business world. One can discover a great deal about underlying motivations to use such language if you approach the study with a key question in mind: “Does the speaker gain more from my comprehension or from my confusion?” Why would confusion be advantageous to players of the game of business? We can learn by examining one particular word: hedging.
“When my wife opened the box and took out the ear rings, I noticed a flaw in one of the stud diamonds that I hadn’t seen here in the store yesterday,” the man said earnestly to the attentive sales woman, Jill. “Can you take a look?”
