Microsoft's 'hockey stick on wheels' rolls on optimism

"The Microsoft finance division has their own variation on the hockey stick: The hockey stick on wheels."

""Consider a team which presents their forecasts in the form of a hockey stick graph," said Chen on Tuesday. "They come back the next year with their revised forecasts, and they are the same as last year's forecast, just delayed one year.""

"When this happens, the finance people jokingly call it a 'hockey stick on wheels' because it looks like somebody bolted wheels onto the bottom of the hockey stick graph and is just rolling it forward by one year each year."

Microsoft finance uses the term 'hockey stick on wheels' for forecasts that are optimistic but repeatedly postponed, causing projected growth to slide forward each year. A hockey stick graph depicts flat or negative present performance followed by a projected sharp exponential rise. Sales forecasts often adopt this shape because sales roles incentivize optimism about future growth. When revised forecasts reproduce prior projections shifted by a year, overlaid charts show the hockey stick sliding forward rather than materializing. Finance teams sometimes call overlapping, jagged forecasts a 'hairy back' when remnants of earlier projections remain visible.

Read at Theregister