Metaphors in Business

Presented by Kristina Torgomyan

This idea is so utterly pervasive, in life as well as business, that it scarcely registers as a metaphor. Yet before the Industrial Revolution, when people started to be paid for the hours they worked, nobody would have used phrases like ‘saving time’, ‘spending time’, ‘wasting time’, ‘affording the time’, ‘running out of time’, ‘living on borrowed time’ or anything else that characterizes time as a fungible resource. Living, as we do, under the tyranny of the clock, it’s hard to imagine what life was like without this metaphor. Perhaps times of day were more like labels that were applied to certain events, when they had to be. Otherwise, time must have slipped by without needing to be counted, measured or exchange, existing only in our heads and the natural cycles of the world.

This is another product of the Industrial Revolution, when businesses were characterized like the machines around which they were built. Applying the concept of mechanization to human work led to things like organizational diagrams (=blueprints), departments (=components), job specifications (=functions) and so on. All these concepts were productive in their way, but they obscured the reality of an organisation as a group of people. Unlike uniform components, people have very different abilities and aptitudes. And unlike machines, they can’t be turned up, dismantled or tinkered with at will.

Mechanistic management ideas certainly haven’t gone away, but these days forward-thinking organizations might complement them with the idea of the business as a person, with a ‘personality’ (i.e. company culture) and the capacity to ‘learn’.

This adds a welcome dimension of humanity. However, thinking of an organisation as a single person also obscures its plurality. While we can speak of a person having ‘values’ and ‘beliefs’, a group can only really have shared interests at best. When a large company claims to have a unified ‘culture’ or ‘philosophy’, it’s really articulating managers’ imposed ideas, not speaking on behalf of everyone inside the firm.

I’ve explored the origins and popularity of this word here. To the extent that it is a metaphor, it suggests that business situations are problems or puzzles to which a particular product or service is the answer. That’s probably positive, although it arguably implies that the customer lacks intelligence for not being able to work it out themselves.

More distantly, there’s also the chemical meaning of ‘solution’, which is one substance dissolved in another to form a single-phase mixture. While this connotation is probably perceived only faintly (if at all), it is quite apposite: the problem is the solute and the product is the solvent, and they combine perfectly to form the solution.

products-are-clothes This metaphor draws a distinction between ‘off the shelf’ products or services, made to a predetermined specification, and those that are ‘tailored’, ‘bespoke’ or ‘made to measure’ to meet the needs of a particular customer.

‘Off the shelf’ is often used pejoratively by high-end service providers, but off-the-shelf goods are usually cheap and convenient, which people may value and therefore regard positively.

Conversely, ‘tailored’ and particularly ‘bespoke’ carry connotations of Savile Row expense and social superiority. If you’re selling to an inverted snob who wouldn’t buy a tailored suit even if they could afford it, they may be turned off by this highfalutin sense of ‘giving oneself airs’.