by Sarah Jane Gilbert

Quick: Would you rather be an alpha dog or a crusader among your coworkers? You definitely don't want to be dead wood. Although these terms may sound odd, you have surely heard them around the office. To help sort through the lingo, Ron Sturgeon has compiled a reference text with examples of how 1,200 words and phrases are commonly used in the workplace.

Sturgeon is an entrepreneur who, armed with a high school education, created a successful auto salvage business that he sold to a large auto manufacturer in 1999. From that experience he wrote his first book, How to Salvage Millions from Your Small Business. He has since founded and sold other companies in real estate and business consulting. For his second book he collected curious phrases that have popped up over the past six years.

The book is broken into two sections. The first, “Green Weenies,” contains the more humorous jargon. There are brief descriptions of each term and examples of how it might be properly used in a sentence. Here is an Elvis year, for example: “Profits are up, spending is down, this is our Elvis year!” The second half, “Due Diligence,” provides similarly light-hearted explanations of more serious business terms such as clawback provisions, in the cuts, and see-through. A nice complement to both sections is the comical drawings sprinkled throughout by talented illustrator Gahan Wilson, whose illustrations have appeared in everything from The New Yorker to children’s books over the last twenty-five years.

Still can’t decide if you want to be an alpha dog or a crusader? Well, an alpha dog is a natural leader while a crusader is someone with zealous beliefs in the company. Maybe you are neither, but this book provides the lingo you’ll need to figure it out.

Reproduced here with the permission 
 of HBS Working Knowledge.