Cover Your Ass

Obviously good advice when in prison.

Also a useful instruction in the corporate world. The heavily-repeated maxim, sometimes shortened to just "CYA," refers to steps taken to make sure that the bad consequences of any decision don't endanger your personal career.

Your company has a choice. Launch a new formulation of your signature eyebrow resealing product or launch your existing formulation in Serbia, which some people in your analytics division say is primed for significant eyebrow resealant growth.

There's not enough money for both. You've been asked to produce a memo giving your opinion. You study the issue and determine that it's basically a coin toss. Both choices have a roughly equal chance of making money or becoming a complete debacle.

It's CYA time. You don't want to be on the wrong side. If you pick the choice that wins and that decision loses money, your career at the company is effectively dead. But if you're on the side that doesn't get picked, you'll look weak and people will stop asking for your opinion. Yikes. Basically, no-win.

So you write a 145-page memo detailing the pros and cons of both cases and making sure it's packed with as many smart-sounding multi-syllable words as you can find on thesaurus.com. Meanwhile, you obscure your recommendations with a lot of repetitions of "on the other hand" and "of course, it must be noted that..." In the end, you're pretty sure that no one will read the memo all the way through, and you can always refer to it no matter what happens ("As you'll recall from my memo, I detailed this exact scenario...")

Ass covered. Whatever happens, you're good.