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>Can we stop comparing business to war? In war, [...]

No, we can't because talking about any topic with war metaphors seems to be deeply ingrained in human linguistics.

In games like football, we talk about the the quarterback being the "field general" and the offensive tackles and defensive tackles "battling in the trenches".

When husbands & wives argue or fight in divorce cases, we talk about them "drawing their battle lines".

Historians or politicians often talk of "class warfare" or "war on poverty". The "Occupy Wall Street" protest is another borrowing of words from war.

Biologists and doctors talk about "war against disease" and the "war on cancer".

Wikipedia's most controversial articles have "edit wars" which results in pages getting locked.

In computer science, we have the "Byzantine Generals Problem" which is war metaphor.

If you want to jump into every thread <topic X> to plead with people to "stop comparing X to war", you're not going to get anywhere. (E.g. "can we please stop comparing distributed computing fault detection to Byzantium generals and war?")

Even the linguistics field which studied our propensity to always compare topics to "war" also went meta on itself with "linguistic wars": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistics_wars

> Biologists and doctors talk about "war against disease" and the "war on cancer".

There was an article posted to HN some time ago (last year?) that argued we should stop saying people must "fight cancer" and similar terminal diseases, because it puts the patient in an unfair position: it's all about their "will to live" and their "struggle", and if they die, it can be seen as a failure on their part. While (I think) there is a mental factor to fighting terminal diseases, the article argues cancer will often kill you regardless of how much you "fight", so it's unfair to put it in those terms.

Good point, I'd also like to add that just because an analogy doesn't apply 100% when you try to push it as far as you can, doesn't mean it's not a useful analogy. If you could push an analogy all the way and still have it apply 100%, then it wouldn't be an analogy, it would just be the thing.

> ingrained in human linguistics

Or maybe more accurately it's deeply ingrained in Anglo-American culture?

>Or maybe more accurately it's deeply ingrained in Anglo-American culture?

I don't know about all languages but French, German, and Chinese all have military and war metaphors that are commonly used in everyday speech. It's not unique to American English.

I think war may be more similar to business than you think it is. And it may not be very much like the war you imagine in your head.

You think there is singularity of purpose in war? Every general, every battalion, every captain, every soldier has their own interests at play. It's a miracle of leadership that those can be put aside long enough to fight side by side.

Crushing the competition sounds like the right move in war. But then why have so many armies failed to subdue and control the local populace? Could it be that treating the conquered with respect, as partners, as humans, might be more effective than sheer domination?

And how sustainable is war? It depends. In WW1, soldiers at the front lines for more than a few days often suffered shell shock from the severe tension, nonstop terror, and unbelievable pounding that must have felt like it came from the bowels of the Earth. In other wars, there is no traditional front line, and soldiers are deployed for months or years. And they're not in 100% fight mode the entire time either.

War and business are not the same. But they may be closer than you think.

The difference is killing, trauma, and death.

I would say that you are conflating two things: war done to destroy the enemy, and then taking political power of another nation by force, and ensuring safety and continuance of government. Soldiers do the first job, and police do the second. In the Global War on Terror, the line has gotten blurry, (even Vietnam was called a "police action") but even the lowest intensity conflict has life and death sacrifices for the mission and the imposition of political will over a populace through threat of violence that are completely unknown in a modern tech business. You could make the argument that lawsuits would be the equivalent to direct action, and I might agree with that, except there is no violence and it's done entirely within a set of rules (the legal system).

I would agree that businesses and militaries do share similarities, and solve for the same problems. For instance, employee surveys came out of troop morale studies in WWI, and there is a lot of cross contamination of ideas, like the book, "Team of Teams".

Finally, there are cases where businesses actual do go to war, think Blackwater, circa 2006, where the services provided directly support one side in an armed conflict. To me, that's what a business going to war looks like!

I don't really think he is conflating the two. OP make references to different types of conflicts. "Handling" occupied territories is something that can be a struggle both in standard all out nation state wars and in cases where you are fighting against gurellia warriors.

> In war, you destroy the enemy

I don't think that anything even remotely that decisive has been the case for many years now. From what I see, war these days is a lot more about attempting to establish a strong enough position to deter competetion for a sufficient duration to achieve economic/political ends.

It was at least the case for the Vietnam War, where -- besides preventing the spread of communism, the "domino theory" -- there was no clear overall strategy or goals, so the objective and only metric of success was body count. In that war, the US goal was to kill the enemy.

Of course, the US has been widely criticized for using that strategy and it likely was a major factor in their failure to win that war.

It took me a short while to parse what you were saying because I never thought of enemy combatants as "the enemy". The actual enemy is the political force to continue fighting, which generally is very loosely correlated with the people on the front.

I guess that's part of the problem with the Vietnam War. The nominal enemy was the vague concept of communism, and the actual enemy were the (perceived hostile) people of Vietnam, so the goal became killing them, aka "body count". That was never going to end well, one way or the other.

> It's a matter of life and death, and the strategic objectives are black and white.

To my mind, that is the whole point of the wartime analogy. It _is_ life and death (for your company) when you are at war.

Sometimes you need shocking analogies to get the message across to employees; if you have weeks of money left in the bank, you need everyone to be ruthlessly focused on the strategy that has been decided. No time for picking daisies or fixing tech debt when you have weeks of money left! This shocking analogy aims to provides focus and clarity when it's most needed.

> When Steve Jobs returned to Apple, the company was weeks away from bankruptcy—a classic wartime scenario. He needed everyone to move with precision and follow his exact plan; there was no room for individual creativity outside of the core mission. In stark contrast, as Google achieved dominance in the search market, Google’s management fostered peacetime innovation by enabling and even requiring every employee to spend 20% of their time on their own new projects.

Yeah but the parent comments point is that “life and death for a company” is categorically different from life and death for human beings, ie actual life and death.

I suspect that as far as analogies go, this is a pretty tame one for a typical wartime CEO.

I would say zero to 1 is not wartime though. I hope no one is suggesting this.

Wartime is more about your company is rapidly coming apart at the seams and growth rates are going down rather than up.

If you've ever been in such a company you'd probably get why the brutal analogy being made.

Arguably, war is about the life and death of your state as a political entity. The lives and deaths of the people are the PR spin.

That's silly though. That's not what war is like. War is messy and ad hoc.

I completely agree that the comparisons to war are way overdone. However if this is your perception of war, then there is a lot that isn't really accurate.

1. If everyone doesn't go home it's a crisis, it's NEVER ok

2. We work unbelievably hard to try and find "viable, co-operative alternatives" and, at least in modern warfare, there is almost never a singularity of purpose

3. "Crushing" your competition hasn't worked since WWII - even then we worked to rebuild afterwards. Building Partnerships is a key tenet of modern warfare

4. On the ground negotiations are a daily/standard practice in the shit even if they aren't formal diplomatic negotiations

5. Low-Intensity war has been the standard for over a decade now too...and being in a warzone for a year at a time is not uncommon

So there's things to be learned on either side and it's worth really understanding both to have a full picture.

>Can we stop comparing business to war? In war, you destroy the enemy, and pay in blood and gold. It's a matter of life and death, and the strategic objectives are black and white.

War is just a continuation of politics, and politics are neither black nor white. Neither strategic objectives are black and white - due to fog of war and imperfect intelligence.

>Business is not really like this.

It kinda can be, if you drive out competition, attaining a virtual monopoly(you keep one competing company on life support while you reap all the benefits, without having all the disadvantages of being a literal monopoly) on your speciality you are literally destroying a livelihood of all people employed by your competition.

>First, if everyone doesn't go home, you're going to have a major problem with OSHA.

if your employees are desperate enough, they will comply, especially in countries with lack of social safety net.

Is it horrible? absolutely yes, and we should do everything from system perspective to prevent it.

I agree with you on principle, but the "wartime/peacetime" vocabulary comes from "The Godfather" - a movie not about war, but the Mafia which I think is a little more useful to compare to business.

That's a bit simplistic and literal after all War is "war is the continuation of policy by other means"

I served in war time.

I run businesses now.

Business is war.

War is business.

Another reason to stop is that most people in America at least simply don't understand war or the military very well. Since the end of the draft in the 1970s only a small percentage of the population has sufficient experience to talk about it sensibly.

I like baseball or football analogies much better. People who use them are a lot more likely to know what they are talking about.

If you can get a copy of National Lampoon's Aggression Issue (1980), I recommend P.J. O'Rourke's piece...

Business is not war, but they are similar enough.

If you can't earn your money by winning against competitors, you will be left to starve and die. No blood, no trauma, but the end result is not too different.