“Leverage” is what we say when we want to use something without specifying how, or how much, or whether the thing in question can support the weight. The word is load-bearing in the sentence and weightless in practice. We are leveraging our network. We are leveraging our platform. We are leveraging the insights from last quarter’s retrospective that many people attended but few remember attending. The leverage is implied. The mechanism is not your concern.
The verb form is where it gets honest. “We should leverage this” is an instruction with no owner, no timeline, and no unit of measurement for whether the leveraging occurred. Someone will write it in the follow-up notes. It will appear in the next deck under “key actions.” At the quarterly review it will have migrated to “ongoing,” which is the organizational equivalent of a gym bag left in the car. Still there. Still technically in use.
What makes “leverage” indispensable is its directionality. It implies force applied to an object to produce a result larger than the input, which is the promise every executive is contractually obligated to make and no one is contractually obligated to measure. A budget is not spent; it is leveraged. A partnership is not used; it is leveraged. The intern’s research, the leftover media buy, the brand recognition in a market we entered eighteen months ago and have not revisited: all of it goes in as straw and comes out, in the presentation, as a lever. The slide does not show what is on the other end of the lever. The slide shows the lever.
We have significant leverage in this space. We look forward to leveraging it going forward.
