Donel Young and Jeff Caponigro are entrepreneurs in the same
industry, in similar-sized companies. But to Young, a partner in
two-person New York City communications firm Hansen & Young, a
day at the office is a spin on the dance floor. For Caponigro, CEO
and president of 10-person Caponigro Public Relations Inc. in
Southfield, Michigan, it's a football game to be won.
"For us, a dance is how we think about business," says
Young. "It's a dance between the client and the media,
trying to figure out what we can offer the media so they will call
our client back."
"We're in a competition," counters Caponigro.
"We've got opponents. We keep score with our finances. I
look at myself as the head coach of a football team."
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The metaphors these entrepreneurs use to think about their
businesses are more than shortcuts or convenient communications
tools. They powerfully affect the firms' competitive strategies
and, ultimately, their effectiveness as competitors.
When you think of your business as a game, as a war or as some
other metaphor, you are shaping your whole approach to business,
says Shelby Hunt, a marketing professor at Texas Tech University in
Lubbock, Texas, who has studied business metaphors extensively.
Says Hunt, "It suggests a pattern of associations you bring to
a situation."
You may remember learning a metaphor is a figure of speech in
which one thing is said to be another. Unlike a simile, which uses
the words "like" or "as," a metaphor
doesn't so much compare two things as indicate they are one and
the same. Saying "business is war" is different from
saying "business is like war."
One of the best-known metaphors is "marketing myopia."
This phrase, coined in 1960 by marketing guru Theodore Leavitt,
makes the point that marketers are shortsighted by comparing the
way marketing is practiced to the way an eye sees.
By equating one thing to another, a new relationship is
highlighted or a new idea is explored. Some of the most common
business metaphors, along with war and sports, are business as
biology--as in "product life cycle"--and business as
marriage, a metaphor commonly used by companies to describe
strategic alliances, supplier-vendor relationships and the
like.
"People use [metaphors] to communicate with like-minded
people and because they're comfortable," explains William
H. Crookston, an entrepreneurship professor at the University of
Southern California in Los Angeles. "It's as if
there's a language of entrepreneurship or business."
But Hunt argues that using metaphors like these merely to
communicate is not making the most of this powerful business tool.
Instead of using metaphors simply to make points or explain
concepts, he urges businesspeople to use metaphors to help plan
competitive strategies.
"To me, the great benefit of using metaphors is they spur
creativity and innovation," says Hunt. "They can provide
a new way to look at something you've been looking at for a
long time."
When you're out of ideas or the old strategies just
don't seem to be working, Hunt suggests creating a list of
metaphors comparing what it is you're looking at, whether
it's a new product, a new market or the entire business, to
something else.
For instance, an entrepreneur who compares business to war will
likely be thinking about such military maxims as "don't
divide your forces" or "choose your own ground for
battles."
An entrepreneur who equates business with dancing might be
concerned with a completely different set of rules--for instance,
staying in time, choosing properly between leading and following
and, of course, not stepping on his or her partner.
In this way, switching to new metaphors may reveal new
resources, suggest new solutions or offer alternate routes around
existing obstacles. "When the creative process runs dry,"
says Hunt, "looking at a fresh metaphor can be
useful."
One point that may seem obvious but is important to keep in mind
is that metaphors aren't true. Business is not war, dance or
marriage, even though it may resemble all these things in
significant ways. An entrepreneur may get some helpful hints by
transplanting football strategy to business, but eventually the
metaphor, like all metaphors, will break down.
"The danger of metaphors is that you may bring in an entire
system of values, behaviors, techniques and strategies that
don't really belong," explains Hunt. For him, the best
example of this is the business as war metaphor.
Hunt cites one common experiment in which people are given two
options in a business scenario. In the first, the business can
charge high prices and make high profits but not hurt competitors.
In the second, the business must charge low prices and earn low
profits but do lots of damage to competitors.
"Interestingly enough, about 35 percent of practitioners
will choose the low price, making less money, just to hurt their
competitor," says Hunt. "I think that comes about because
they frame competition as warfare; therefore, they place a
tremendous importance on punishing their competitors. It makes no
sense, but they're so wrapped up in marketing as war, they make
suboptimal decisions."
One way to avoid metaphoric breakdown is to make sure you choose
a metaphor big enough for the job. For instance, Hunt points to the
business-as-biology metaphor. Product life-cycle theory ties
concepts such as pregnancy and gestation to investment and product
development, compares birth to introducing a product, and equates
product maturity and decline to death and extinction. Other
business-as-biology analysts have looked at competitive markets in
terms of natural selection, population pressure and other ideas
from nature.
When you're looking for a metaphor to use in thinking about
your business, look for one that's similarly broad and deep. In
a June 1995 Journal of Business Research article written
with Emory University marketing professor Anil Menon, Hunt writes,
"Rich metaphors contain a large proportion of substantive,
well-developed concepts that, when transferred to marketing
strategy, can have theoretical potential and practical
significance."
Metaphors can also be mistakes if they're not clear,
especially when they're being used to aid communication. This
is coded language, Crookston points out, and if the person
you're trying to speak to doesn't get your metaphor,
you're back somewhere at square minus one.
Other metaphors can go wrong if they're too well-known.
Stale metaphors only bore and irritate people, without adding to
the communication process or the creative session, says Crookston.
For that reason, entrepreneurs should usually resist the most
common, obvious metaphors. "We've outgrown the athletics
and war stuff," Crookston says.
Not everybody agrees. "It's probably way
overused," Caponigro admits, "but I think about somebody
like Larry Bird, one of the great players in the NBA, who would
shoot a thousand free throws every day. That's how he got
great, and that's how he stayed great. And that's how I
talk to our staff about things like professional development and
how important it is."
Donel Young, on the other hand, believes metaphors themselves
are good opportunities for creativity. Rather than use conventional
metaphors like sports or war, she likes to unexpectedly insert
metaphors uncommon to the business world into otherwise humdrum
meetings. For instance, instead of advising a flighty client to
"follow the game plan," she'll suggest they
"stick to their knitting" just to shake things up.
Similarly, the dance metaphor may give some clients pause, she
says, but it creates a vivid picture of the give and take and sense
of timing required when working with the news media. "The
dance metaphor seems to work best for explaining to our clients why
we do what we do," she says. "It quickly makes it clear
how we work."
Mark Hendricks is an Austin, Texas, writer specializing in
business topics.
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