Lucy on management metaphors in this morning’s FT – pointing to an article in HBR which tells us how to navigate the current economic apocalypse by learning from boxing… specifically that the best way to survive financial meltdown and global recession is to be like Muhammad Ali when he met George Foreman for their Rumble in the Jungle in Kinshasa, Zaire.
In comparison, business – or the theory of business – is terribly simple. We know what we need to survive in troubled times, and it does not take 11 pages of boxing parallels to tell us. We need to cut costs. We need to take fewer risks. We need to conserve cash. We need to pull out of markets in which we are not successful. We need to fly economy – or not at all. There are two things that we don’t need to do: float like a butterfly or sting like a bee.
