Boxing as a metaphor is a new turn for the management guff industry, but it still won’t tell us a thing about how to run a business in tough times

THE GLOVES are off. The creators of business metaphors have been pulling their punches for more than a decade but have now come out swinging. There is a new metaphor in the management ring and, just in case you are too punch-drunk after so many idioms to have guessed what it is, here’s the knockout blow: it’s boxing.

The latest Harvard Business Review contains an 11-page article telling us that the best way to survive global recession is to be like Muhammad Ali when he met George Foreman for their Rumble in the Jungle.

What the renowned boxer’s performance teaches us about thriving in turbulent markets is that we must all be agile and we have to absorb blows. The point is helpfully summarised by various charts, diagrams and a two-by-two matrix with agility up one side and absorption along the other.

Curiously, the HBR doesn’t mention any of the things about boxing that immediately come to my mind. In boxing, you get beaten to a pulp – which must ring a bell with anyone working on the economic front line. In boxing, you are quite likely to wind up with brain damage if you go on doing it for long enough – and, if things get much worse in the economy, this too may come to ring a bell.

Recently, I read that boxing has become newly fashionable as an activity doled out by the authorities to young delinquents to distract them from drug-taking and knife crime. However, to discover that boxing is now the very latest fashion for management theorists is more surprising still.

The HBR article brings to an end 15 years of peace, love and political correctness by the purveyors of management metaphor. It is the first evidence I have seen from the management guff industry that “soft” is finally on its way out and “hard” is on its way in.

Since I started following these things in the early 1990s, there have been three different sorts of metaphors wheeled out by gurus to help explain and prescribe business behaviour, all benign. The first were musical metaphors. There was the idea of a company as an orchestra, with the chief executive as the conductor. Each knowledge worker scraped away at her fiddle or blew his horn, and the maestro waved a thin stick to bring them together in perfect time and harmony.

This metaphor was popular for a while but, as the internet grew, gurus got groovier and decided that classical was out and jazz was in. The great leader must not tell his players how to play but let them jam, be creative. Presently, even this seemed too square, and in 2002 a Swedish writer said that the chief executive should be like a DJ, mixing records to match the mood on the dance floor.

Even more popular than music as a metaphor has been sport. Most of these have been based on the idea that business is a team effort (which we know it isn’t, really). Football, rugby, rowing, cricket and baseball have all taken their turn as trendy theories. For one crazy moment, even the downbeat Sven-Göran Eriksson was rebranded as a management guru during his spell as England football manager. The only team sports I have never seen a theory based on are synchronised swimming and lacrosse, but I dare say such theories exist somewhere. Sports without teams also get a look-in, in particular golf.

The third, and daftest, seam of management metaphor comes from science. The idea of a business as a stream of DNA always struck me as moronic. The point about a person’s DNA is that it does not change. The point about companies and business conditions is that they do. It may be more plausible for gurus to talk the language of evolution and describe companies as complex adaptive systems – or it might be helpful if I could understand what they were driving at. A metaphor is meant to simplify, not to obfuscate.

Finally, there have been some outliers that fit none of the three categories: management as akin to being a top chef in a big kitchen, and management likened to animal behaviour. There have been ape theories, geese theories and even frog theories. The softest – and most famous – was the wretched mouse with the wretched cheese in the parable, Who Moved My Cheese?

All of these metaphors have one thing in common: they are perfectly useless. I defy anyone to show how any of them has helped us understand how businesses behave or get better at running them.

Metaphors can be helpful in grasping something when the thing is terribly complicated. So, when Einstein was explaining relativity, he used a train and a clock to help us understand something that would otherwise have been beyond most of us. By comparison, business is terribly simple. We know what we need to survive in troubled times and it does not take 11 pages of boxing parallels to tell us. We need to cut costs. We need to take fewer risks. We need to conserve cash. We need to pull out of markets in which we are not successful. There are two things that we don’t need to do: float like a butterfly or sting like a bee. – (Financial Times service)