I heard myself saying it and was immediately annoyed. As soon as it tumbled down my tongue. “We want to be the head, not the tail, on this.” Are you serious? Did I really just rep this ridiculous metaphor? THE BUSINESS METAPHOR. The scourge of all creative tongues. It’s like watching Shakespeare roll over in his grave.
I am gravely concerned by my use of this most recent darling of belabored business banter. Dynamic, agile, robust, best-in-class brains all sitting around under the glare of fluorescent lighting, balancing the scales of justice in their tiny hands, and drinking from the same firehose. It’s nauseating.
These things incise you, crawl around inside you, until they drive you to a place of unbridled lethargy. And you spout off: Do we have top-down buy-in? Everyone in the room looks at you with the same face. The face that says: We know what you did there. And we like it.
Because if you hadn’t, they would’ve been forced to drink the Kool-Aid, move the needle, or stand at the bleeding edge. For the sake of all that is paper and holy, at least you weren’t compelled to mention that this problem has a lot of moving parts.
In all fairness, there’s no patient on the table. Just a bunch of middle-aged dudes straining against designer neckwear.
EatsProse 