subcontract

Definition

The art of delegating work you've been contracted to do to someone else, while maintaining plausible involvement and a comfortable margin. It's essentially corporate inception: contracts within contracts. Companies use this to claim expertise in everything while actually doing very little themselves.

Example Usage

We'll need to subcontract the electrical work since our team specializes in saying we can do electrical work.

Source: Business terminology via Dictionary definitions

Related Terms

Advanced

shadow organization

The informal network of relationships and power structures that actually gets work done, completely separate from the official org chart. Where real decisions happen over lunch rather than in meetings.

💼 Corporate / Business

Beginner

Win-Win

A negotiation outcome where both sides claim victory, which usually means one side won and the other side is too polite or too confused to realize they lost. The corporate version of a participation trophy.

💼 Corporate / Business

Intermediate

Socialize

To share an idea informally before making it official, essentially pre-selling your proposal through hallway conversations and coffee chats. Politics disguised as collaboration.

💼 Corporate / Business

Intermediate

linkage

A fancy corporate term for 'connection' that makes simple relationships sound more impressive in strategy presentations and consultant reports. It refers to how different things—processes, systems, incentives, or metrics—are mechanically or conceptually connected to produce outcomes, usually in ways that require extensive PowerPoint diagrams to explain. In executive meetings, establishing linkage between your project and revenue somehow makes budget requests more persuasive.

💼 Corporate / Business

Beginner

actionable

Information specific enough to actually act upon, as opposed to the vague insights and useless data that comprise most business reports.

💼 Corporate / Business

Advanced

dual-track agile

A product development approach where discovery and delivery work happen simultaneously on parallel tracks. A noble attempt to do research and execution at the same time that usually results in doing both poorly.

💼 Corporate / Business

Translate This Term

See “subcontract” in Corporate Speak, Gen-Z Slang, Pirate Speak, and more.

Try the Translator

Share This Term

Post on X Share on Facebook Share on LinkedIn

Discover a Term

Advanced

chaos engineering

The practice of intentionally breaking things in production to make sure your systems can handle failure gracefully. It'...