Business C1 · Lesson 10B
Every word and expression from this lesson — with definitions, synonyms and examples.
to spread the cost of an asset — here, distribution — over years
the version of the road behind in which the decision we did take had not, in fact, been taken — the tense discipline in which the third conditional lives
the specific asset (data, network, brand, culture) that will still, in a decade, be recognisable as the thing the firm competes on — the noun the future perfect grammatical arc points at
'we will grow, we will expand' — undifferentiated promises
the implicit undertaking between a founding cohort and its successors about what the firm will still be recognisable by in twenty years
the capital pool — pension, endowment, sovereign — whose mandate is measured in decades, and whose questions the founder has, in the annual letter, to answer in the future perfect
the shape of technological adoption over a decade — flat, then steep, then flat — that the future-perfect sentence in the annual letter has to sit on the correct part of
the future the firm's own actions this year will, in ten years, have brought about — the tense in which strategy either is or is not, in advance, owned
the disciplined imagining of two or three plausible ten-year futures the firm has to be, in advance, hedged against — the register the mixed-tense narrative earns its keep in
the deliberate willingness, over years, not to book the profit that would be available on the shorter horizon — the register in which the past-continuous / future-perfect pairing does its work
what it costs a customer to leave; 'structural' means built into the product, not the contract
the third-conditional sentence that converts a past decision into a fact whose absence would still be visible ten years later
the layering of present perfect continuous, past perfect continuous, third conditional and future perfect / future perfect continuous that situates a firm on a decade's arc
the present-tense opener in which the reader cannot locate the firm at 2011, 2025 or 2035 — the paragraph a shorter-horizon reader prices at a shorter-horizon price
the process by which long-horizon capital prices and approves a plan