This document discusses the use of metaphors in business. It provides three examples: 1) The metaphor of time as a commodity that can be spent, saved, wasted, etc. which emerged during the Industrial Revolution as work became tied to hourly wages. 2) The metaphor of organizations being like machines, with organizational charts, departments, job specifications treating humans like interchangeable parts. This obscured the reality that people have different abilities. 3) More recently, some organizations complement mechanistic views with the metaphor of the business as a person with a culture and capacity to learn. However, thinking of an organization as a single person obscures its plurality of individuals.

1. Metaphors in Business
Presented by Kristina Torgomyan

3. 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.

5. 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.

7. 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.

9. 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.

11. 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’.