My cube is near the conference room, wherein they've got the speaker phone cranked up to a sort of Who concert sound pressure level while our CEO out in California delivers his quarterly earnings report conference call performance.

The CEO is named Eric. Eric says, "Going forward, blah blah Lucent blah blah Ericsson blah blah blah in the next quarter", and then somebody out there in the darkness asks a question: "Blah blah earnings blah blah Lucent going forward?" Eric says "Blah blah blah we would expect to start seeing blah blah blah going forward", as if to say, "Yep".

"Going forward" in business babble means "in the future". A lot of these guys are like kids; they all pick up the same little catchphrases; cf. "peace out".

Ooh! Somebody just spoke of "proactively telling our story out there"!

(Oh, ugly . . . now some market analyst wants to know about revenues from the unit I work for . . . we fade out, as Eric equivocates shamelessly . . .)

Going forward is a relatively new and apparently convenient way to indicate a progression in time from the present. The term suggests a continuing and progressive movement rather than, as in the future can sometimes mean, some specific future date. Like many such expressions, it means enough to be useful while also being suitably vague. The term is widely used in annual reports and other corporate statements and, like such terms as venue and cautionary tale, seems to have been readily adopted by news media writers. The term has become increasingly popular in press releases from Internet start-ups and newly public companies.
"Going forward" also has a longer-standing usage as the starting, continuing, or resumption of activity on something that has been planned previously, such as an engineering project or a summit conference.

Log in or register to write something here or to contact authors.