Comments on: Words you’re probably using wrong

By: Larry Salzman

Larry Salzman — Sat, 29 May 2010 00:18:42 +0000

Thanks, Jason. During the past 18 months I have said that I've been managing a a change to the business model of my company. True, but not precise. The article on pivot was good–and makes it clear that what I was aiming for (and have largely accomplished) is a pivot on the customer segment. Maintaining solvency while shifting the company's orientation toward a new type of customer (enterpreise and B2B from consumer) demanded that we stay grounded in what we already knew and that has been a standard by which I have decided on the changes I've made. In my case, it wasn't a startup that needed to pivot–it was a 10 year old company whose customer segment was rapidly (very rapidly) shifting to Skype and other VoIP solutions for international telecom.

By: jasoncrawford

jasoncrawford — Thu, 13 May 2010 20:58:17 +0000

Ha, good point!

By: DaveJ

DaveJ — Thu, 13 May 2010 18:20:14 +0000

Here is a rule of thumb: any word that VCs start to use regularly with positive connotations, quickly becomes mis-used because entrepreneurs want to position their companies to meet VC demand (whether or not the use of the word is correct).

By: jasoncrawford

jasoncrawford — Thu, 13 May 2010 10:06:46 +0000

I agree, both on the cause and the solution.

By: David Crawford

David Crawford — Thu, 13 May 2010 08:35:58 +0000

It's easy to do this if you use terms like these after hearing them in a conversation. You guess the meaning from context, then adopt it into your vocabulary. So a good lesson to learn from this post is if you find yourself using words and you don't know how you learned them, go to the source!

By: ram

ram — Sun, 09 May 2010 06:44:30 +0000

The title should be “Concepts frequently used incorrectly”. Precise employment of semantics, grammar and spelling minimizes the potential for confusion and the need for caveats and clarification.

By: jasoncrawford

jasoncrawford — Sun, 09 May 2010 03:59:31 +0000

And before anyone else mentions it, I'll say that technically I should have said “wrongly” or “incorrectly” in the title. I'm more of a stickler for precise use of concepts than for precision in grammar, when there's no potential for confusion.