The fact that the objective of a business can be pithily described does not make it easy to achieve. Ronald Reagan once said that politics was simple but hard to do. The same is true of business. Just because it’s simple doesn’t mean it’s easy.

In truth, Mr Micawber was right about business: “annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen and six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery”. To pretend there is a lot more to it is to be needlessly defensive.

That is all they mean and it is a good idea, in a business, to make people pay for stuff. Put like that it seems rather starkly obvious. But maybe many of the precepts of business are starkly obvious and avoiding this troubling fact might be why annual reports are so often so full of guff like this.

The truly skilled user, such as the writer of the 2019 Huawei annual report, can generate something meaningless from the term: “this enables carriers to monetize experience in addition to bandwidth, improving ARPU by more than 25%”. What they mean is that they want to make people pay for stuff.

has “four cornerstones” or “four pillars”, try to ensure that the verb matches the metaphor. It makes sense to erect pillars and cornerstones or to lay them or to build them. It does not make sense to navigate them. Cornerstones are, as the clue in the name tells you, not difficult to locate.