A lexicon of executive lingo
This is the noun du jour for opportunistic investors who exploit perfect storms of economic and internal turbulence to put money into distressed assets. These people talk about moving from value investing (ie just-for-profit) to values investing (ie still-for-profit, but focusing on projects with social aims), but crucially have no personal attachment to whatever branch of business they have selected.
The adjectival industry agnostic or sector agnostic typically appears in marketing pitches ('Industry Agnostic Practices for 360 Degree Business Consulting and Execution Facilitation') or on the CVs of those — in IT, HR, finance - claiming universally applicable skills. Agnostic itself dates from 1869, then meaning unattached to any particular religious creed. In the last year or so, though, it has caught on right across the commercial spectrum in its new, broader sense. Cloud computing is said to be location agnostic, applications are touted as platform agnostic. And I have also come across battery agnostic in the case of an electric car, not to mention vendor agnostic, storage agnostic and silicon agnostic.
Send your buzzwords, jargon and new and exotic usages to tony.thorne@kcl.ac.uk
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