Perhaps. But the danger of clean, attractive, reductionist metaphors and analogies is that the general public -- including decisionmakers in the business world -- tend to reify the analogies, and treat them like immutable laws of physics.

Witness, for instance, the rise and fall (and rise again?) of "The Long Tail." As a concept, the long tail certainly applies to some businesses. But not to all, and not nearly as successfully as the concept's author once claimed. But the business world was frenzied with long-tail fever for years on end. "Long tail" became the buzz-phrase of the day, even in companies for whom the concept made no sense whatsoever. People with no understanding of the underlying principles could, nevertheless, grasp the surface-layer metaphor -- and, in so doing, assume that they understood the whole thing. That's a dangerous mindset.

So there's a sort of Faustian bargain in all of this. Appending a nice metaphor on top of a concept increases the likelihood that the concept will be disseminated, talked about, and taken up. But, at the same time, it invites intellectual laziness and fads of half-baked thought.