Definition:

The corporate Golden hour is the 60 to 90 minute time period where you can have a meeting with attendees from all the Major Time regions: EMEA ¹, NA ² and APAC ³.

Traditionally, the golden hour was when photographers were at their most productive and was the period of the day just before the sun sets or after it rises, when the light is redder and softer than usual so that photographs taken in it have a pleasing quality.

But there is also the golden hour when it comes to corporate meetings. It is a 90 minute window where the three major time regions can all get together for calls, its usually mid afternoon for Europeans, first thing for the Americas and just in time for the final meetings that Asia/Pacific are willing to do.

It’s most commonly between 2:00pm and  3:30pm G.M.T., and for most international companies and projects its packed. I myself have a record of 9 concurrent meetings during this time period.

1. Which is Europe, Middle East and Africa[↩]
2. Which is North America, South America and Canada[↩]
3. Which is the Asia Pacific region[↩]

Definition:

A “curry house flower” is an item that was once only an extra to a process, but becomes mandatory to retain the customers satisfaction.

This is a really old one that I hadn’t had cause to dredge up for years.
A “curry house flower” comes from a scenario that was explained to me at General Electric back in the 90s. its a occasional gift to go above and beyond for a customer. But if given too often becomes an entitlement when it has no relevance to the core deliverable.

In this scenario, you go to your favourite curry house and order your favourite curry, you’re walking out perfectly satisfied with the transaction and looking forward to your food when they present you with a flower at the door to take back to your loved one.
You’re really pleased with this gift, it has nothing to do with the curry but it’s nice to have. The next time you go for a curry, the same thing happens, and you come back with both the curry and the flower, this continues two or three more times.

Then they stop giving you the flower, for whatever reason. You come home with only the curry and you’re now dissatisfied with the curry house.
You form a negative opinion on it. You still have an amazing curry and your original purpose in going there is still being achieved, but now you’re unhappy because you didn’t get your freebee.
In the corporate world, this is often seen in terms of large third parties who build gigantic and beautiful weekly PowerPoint status reports, they have dedicated people spending ages on them, and the cost is not seen because its a tiny line item in a gigantic project.
Managers get used to these beautiful, maximum effort presentations on what is a simple status report. but if they stop getting them because they have moved to another vendor or gone internal, or there’s a budget cut.
They become massively dissatisfied with the delivery on the project because they have not received a fancy gift with what is a well running project.

Definition:

When an event is triggered in one place, that leads to multiple different parts of an organisation needing separate updates, and such requests all lead back to a single person.

Explanation:

An odd little phrase I heard recently. It comes about when a number of requests along the same line will come to you, usually from managers of some description. They will be very vague and very open to interpretation, and often without context.
The root cause of this will be a senior person that has heard something or been made aware of something, and in their desire to learn more about it, they will ask all of their subordinates to investigate. These will in turn ask the same of their own people, and this will roll down to the project manager level, who will then all concentrate on one or two subject matter experts to provide them with a genuine answer.
There will be a certain amount of Chinese whispers to these requests, but subject matter experts will be able to see this sudden trend of being asked about something all along the same lines.
By the time it reaches a subject matter expert, it often will not make any sense and require clarification from the original manager, leading to frustration. However, the most fun part is watching how the managers take what is often a blunt and no nonsense answer and convert it to a more “seeming” response, frequently changing its meaning.

Definition:

This is a way of saying that although something might look effortless, there is a lot of activity going on behind the scenes to make it happen.

Explanation: