Jerks and Yanks

Businessspeak includes lots of metaphors from physics: talk about how things are "positioned" in the marketplace, or how a team's "velocity" is high, or how the company's production is "accelerating." Why stop there?

The derivative of acceleration is "jerk" and is a measure of how fast your acceleration is changing. It's the thing that can cause you to spill your drink in a moving car or give you whiplash. And you can quantify how much of a jerk you're experiencing -- you could express it in meters-per-second-cubed.

And when you figure mass into the equation, the equivalent derivatives to velocity/acceleration/jerk are momentum/force/yank. So yank equals mass times jerk.

Or, in business-speak, a massive company only has to be a minor jerk to be a huge yanker.