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Comment by awakeasleep | Hacker News Reader

I hate it when executives start using war analogies to talk about business.

It has always indicated that I should start looking for a new job because I'm not going to fit with the new culture. It's not just that I'm an anti-war hippie either. Describing your business in terms of war both disrespects the tremendous toll paid by soldiers and civilians, and indicates a "winners and losers" mindset, but that mindset also indicates it's part of your objective to hurt 'the enemy'.

It's a morally broken, inefficient and emotional way to look at business.

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war analogies to talk about business.

A previous job had the “tiger team” who would meet in the “war room”. But to the entire rest of the company they were mediocre middle-managers of a medium-sized IT department and everyone else called it the “comfy room” because it had sofas and a Nintendo.

Also, to anyone with similar delusions, a Bluetooth headset does not make you a gunship pilot...

Many Bothans died to bring us this TPS report.

(+1) Well done.

If there's a concise, non-militaristic name for a team with a specific, urgent, short-term objective holed up in a room together, I'd love to hear about it. "Strike team" and "war room" just work really well.

crysis team works really well (and is commonly used in german)

That's pretty good. I worry that admitting there's a "crisis" (even when there is) wouldn't go over too well with management, though.

Another true story, at a different job I was once on the “disaster recovery” team but that implied there might be a disaster so we became the “business continuity team” but that implied there might be an interruption so we were finally renamed “the major events team”.

well tactics has military connotations but also applies outside of the military so short term is the tactical team, and the long term is the strategy team.

The Reboot team?

https://i.ytimg.com/vi/5Qz3igEAlYw/maxresdefault.jpg

a team with a specific, urgent, short-term objective holed up in a room together

They were not this. They were Walter Mitty fantasists. That’s what happens when people take the “business is war” mindset too seriously.

How about “the priority one support team” in “meeting room A”?

The fire brigade. If you call the team that then you will find that where they meet doesn't require a name, since it is just an abstract representation of the burning building.

I always found calling everything a "mission" to be a bit overdramaticized as well.

Examples of "missions":

- Invading Normandy

- Launching a rocket

Examples of non-"missions":

- Deploying a new ad platform to your website

- Writing a photo-sharing app

This battle (ha!) was probably lost decades ago, though.

Really. Doesn't seem that inefficient if you look at how aggressive some of the top companies are when it comes to competition. That last part is the key, it's a competition and there are winners and losers.

Winning might be that you have carved out a niche market but that probably means you are a loser in the mass market, this is not inherently a bad thing in my mind.

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