Technical jargon: What does "sideways" actually mean?

It's not like everything going forward is all good, but sideways? Sounds kind of perplexing. And it is. Perhaps that's why you hear the adjective more and more often when it comes to evaluating strategies, concepts and ideas. "A bit sideways", "rather sideways" or "already very sideways" is what they say. And that in turn accurately captures the momentum of an unsettled industry.

While in recent years technology companies have forced all industry players to think and move forward, these innovation and disruption locomotives are currently also moving sideways, beset by antitrust, data protection, fraud, racial profiling and other issues. This is probably tempting many in the creative industry, who have only just awoken from the doze of the golden years, to doze off again, convinced that the digital revolution is not yet taking place at the expected pace.

But watch out! The title of a 1974 film by the German director Alexander Kluge, incidentally a slightly modified quote by Friedrich von Logau that is even older (from the 17th century), reads today like a warning call to all decision-makers: In times of greatest need, the middle way brings death. To escape this "valley of death," only more honesty can help.

Because in the past, work that wasn't so great was simply called mediocre, mediocre, average, mediocre, tolerable, moderate, or even so-so, but everyone knew that no matter what you called it, it simply wasn't good enough. Today, people prefer to say sideways and think that something is moving. In the process, one crawls through mediocrity or remains undecided until something new comes along. Mostly from outside. And then people complain again about the lack of innovative and disruptive power.