War is hell. Business is business. Why does everyone talk like General Patton?

This morning, much like every morning, Apple News informed me of several things I didn’t know mostly about people I’d never heard of. There were updates on a real estate reality star’s? adorable kids, how someone else wore the season’s affordable must-have look, and something delicious to make for Thanksgiving from Ina Garten. Standard fare.

But there was also Jeff Bezos on CNN urging consumer prudence and suggesting people put off big-ticket purchases like appliances and cars (and possibly professional sports franchises) in order to stash some savings away for lean times. “Keep some dry powder on hand” he advised…and instantly I forgot all about Ina’s chocolate pecan pie and thought of muskets and wooden kegs and whatever primitive projectiles they had around in 1812.?

Once again, it’s business talking war, the vernacular of choice for business men (and it’s usually men) from stratospheric CEOs like Bezos to that colleague trying to sound upbeat on the weekly stand-up. You know the one, with the acronyms and the “uplevels” and the “30,000 foot view”. He’s actually a great teammate—a bonafide hustler and a solid guy—plus he’s an effective communicator. But if you really pay attention to what he’s saying and the metaphors he uses, you’ll hear the unmistakable language of war.?

And since the other thing Apple News told me was that missiles were fired into Poland, killing two civilians caught in the cross-fire of Russia’s horrific, months long invasion of Ukraine, it seemed like as good time to think about how we speak, what we’re saying, and why the business of killing has seeped so thoroughly into the language of business.

Only the world of sports, with its “out-of-the-park grand slams”, “two minute warnings”, and “blocking and tackling” is a deeper source of workday metaphors. But war is a close second. And it’s easy to understand why: whenever a big group of individuals is working in a systematized, coordinated way toward a common goal, it’s tempting not to think of it as a “campaign” or “a blitz” or to think of yourselves as “foot soldiers” on the “front lines”. Military metaphors are common because they’re so useful.

And while it’s a little hysterical to presume that anyone using the terms of combat is a secret warmonger, the insidious thing is how unconscious we are to the violent origins of the terms we use every day to describe the work we do. Here are a few examples:?

Air Cover: Whatever your CRO meant when he said, “that’ll provide the air cover we need for H2”, he probably wasn’t thinking of the Luftwaffe’s 57 day-blitz of London in 1940 or the aerial attack Syria used to drop nerve gas on its own civilians in 2018.?

"Triage” is French for having to make a shitty battlefield decision about which friend loses a leg and which one loses a life.??

Triage: When your product team is acting fast to correct whatever bugs they find in the new release, prioritizing the most urgent and widespread problems first, it’s unlikely that they’re thinking about field medics making battlefield decisions about which lives were worth trying to save and which ones were just too far gone. But that’s where “triage” comes from: it’s French for having to make a shitty battlefield decision about which friend loses a leg and which one loses a life.??

Bullet Points?

To be fair, even elementary school kids are taught to use bullet-points or at least recognize them when they spot them in a text book, but that doesn’t alter the fact that bullets were invented with the sole purpose of killing stuff. Just saying.?

Frontlines, Flank & Footsoldiers

You’d be hard-pressed to go a day of Zoom calls without hearing some mention of one of these. It’s the language of sales bravado usually spoken by people whose only combat experience is in Mortal Combat. Frontlines are created by the formation of heavily armed humans (let’s call them footsoldiers) who are unlucky enough to be first in line to face an advancing line of other heavily armed humans (also foot soldiers) who are trying to kill them. Unless those foot soldiers are attacking from the flank, in which case they’re trying to kill them from the side. In either formation, when they’re engaged in combat, a battalion’s quarterly revenue goals seem a distant concern.???????

As of this week, Ukraine is facing a cold, combative winter without basic resources or any sense of stability or security. Nine months of war have given words new meanings. To them, the terms “air cover” and “on the front lines” and “foot soldiers” aren’t terms they hear in a sales meeting, the way many of them probably did even as a year ago. Now air cover is an existential threat, a horror from above. Foot soldiers are their brothers and sons, boyfriends and husbands and roommates. War is hell. Work is a privilege, a peacetime luxury. Maybe our language should keep that distinction in mind.