

Do women ever conflate war and business? - Stronico

An open question - There was recently a post about "Burning boats" comparing ancient wars to modern business.  The author is male.<p>My question - do women ever use military metaphors in to explain business matters?  I can't recall a single time.
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msredmond
Yes, actually. I'm a woman, I used to write long business articles for
magazines, and I'd often use a war motif for those articles (common thing to
use a motif -- offers art choices and/or keeps the writer entertained). War
just gives you lots of great word choices ("bombarded" "invades" etc.)that
seemed to go well in business articles, esp when you're looking at one company
vs. another or a new one breaking into the market.

It's kinda like how you often see "capitulate" somewhere in an article about
France (even if not related) -- it just works together ;-)

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Stronico
Interesting. Did you ever compare business tactics to actual military
campaigns and strategy?

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msredmond
No. Unfortunately, I don't know enough about actual campaigns/strategy to do
so. Not that I don't find the topic interesting, but I just never did enough
background reading to pull something like that off (unless the Flashman books
count ;-), and when you're on deadline, you don't have the time to do detailed
research on off-topics. Woulda been cool though -- maybe if women do less
reading of that topic, those types of detailed analogies would be used less,
but I do think everyone loves a good, violent analogy whenever possible

