No More Metaphors

A few years ago, I set out to compile an A-to-Z roster of business metaphors. In less than two weeks, I had all 26 entries, starting with “Antarctica” (Shackleton’s Way: Leadership Lessons from the Great Antarctic Explorer) and ending with “Zeus” (Gods of Management: The Changing Work of Organizations). In between came books or articles comparing business to, among other subjects, Star Trek, organized crime, The Wizard of Oz, yachting, fairy tales, and—my favorite—geese. (I largely eschewed the many, many works on war and sports. Fish in a barrel, I figured.) A few of the books were pretty good. More seemed to exist not because the author had something genuinely different to say but because he or she had found a slightly different way of saying something. Now, I’m actually pretty fond of metaphors. I recognize their role in education and—as the good people at the Boston Consulting Group persuasively argue—in innovation. But I wonder whether the obsession with metaphors devalues management as a field. After all, the more something is like other things (and the more other things it is like), the less it is distinctly itself. In addition, metaphors are never better than approximations. Are jazz combos really the best models for spontaneous collaboration in engineering teams, considering how dramatically different their personalities, time frames, and deliverables are? Other fields thrive within their own frames of reference. This is, in part, a triumph of language. The sciences have their own highly specific vocabularies, which are coupled to highly specific sets of ideas. (Physics is particularly plummy: think antimatter, entropy, quarks.) The same is true of cooking. Scan the first hundred cookbooks on Amazon, and you won’t stumble across a single metaphor-themed entry. (I don’t count The Cake Mix Doctor or The Wine Bible, which beyond their titles make no reference to medicine or religion, respectively.) A similar tour of business books turns up management lessons from dog training, Renaissance art patronage, the U.S. Navy, fish markets, and—not surprisingly—physics. One—admittedly nontraditional—indication of a discipline’s conceptual fertility is its ability to spawn new language. New words emerge where there are new ideas, and where there are new ideas something is happening. Internet culture and commerce rapidly produced a large, distinctive vocabulary for their many distinctive concepts. Some of that language is coinage: spot-on terms like “dot-com” and “click stream” sprang up without antecedents. And some of that language (“portal,” “surfing”) is metaphor—but metaphor that draws more power from the new meaning than from the old. (When was the last time you said “spam” and meant lunch meat?) Creative language, almost as much as creative technology, keeps the Internet revolution alive in the public mind. The best books about business management are about business management, and there is plenty of smart, original work in that area. But the vocabulary has grown stale, the imagery dull. That is no invitation to concoct words for novelty’s sake. Management authors should seek to express their ideas in language that is inventive, precise, and organic to the subject. Managers, meanwhile, should spend less time peering through the scrim of others’ disciplines and more time pioneering those practices that will confer a unique identity on their own

No More Metaphors

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