Why 'War' Metaphors Can Quietly Poison Your Workplace

Say "let's kill the competition" enough times in a sales meeting, and eventually people start treating coworkers like enemies instead of teammates. That's the case ICS marketing teacher Mr. Jason made to Students Incorporated host Highlight and co-hosts Josiah and Proud, sitting alongside English Language Arts teacher Mr. Ben for an episode built around a single claim: metaphors aren't decoration on top of language. They're instructions for how to act.

"Kill the Competition" vs. "Win-Win"

Mr. Jason, who teaches marketing, entrepreneurship, and business at ICS, said he's heard war metaphors used in business more than once: "crushing your competition," "capturing territory," and, inside sales departments specifically, a line he's heard used without irony: "I'm going to kill the competition. What can we do to kill the competition?" His point wasn't that the phrase is dramatic. It's that repeating it changes behavior. Reach for war language often enough, he argued, and a team stops looking for what he called "win-win situations" (partnerships built on collaboration) and starts operating like everyone outside the group is a target. "It could hurt your organizational culture," he said, "and it could actually put people within your organization against each other as well." Metaphors are powerful enough, in his framing, that repetition turns them into belief, and belief turns into behavior: "if we continue to repeat them and use them over and over, we start to believe them and we start to act it out."

Teaching a Third-Grader What a CPU Is

The same mechanism that makes war metaphors dangerous is what makes the right metaphor useful in a classroom. Mr. Jason described an assignment in his technology class where students design a poster explaining a computer's internal components, written for an elementary-age audience. The technical vocabulary doesn't survive that translation on its own. Nobody expects a second grader to retain "central processing unit." So the poster has to reach for something the student already understands: CPU becomes "the brain of the computer," because everyone, adult or child, already knows what a brain does.

He carried the same logic into his marketing class, where he tells students to compress a pitch into something a customer can grasp before their attention drifts:

A metaphor is the elevator pitch of an idea.

If you can't get a product's value across in the time it takes to name it, he said, you've probably already lost the audience.

Four Kinds of Metaphor Hiding in Plain Sight

Asked to break down how metaphors actually work, Mr. Ben ran through four categories, each with its own texture. A standard metaphor makes a flat, direct equation: "the classroom was a zoo." An implied metaphor never names the comparison at all; it hides inside a verb, the way "the rumor slithered through the hallways of the school" makes a reader think of something sneaky and venomous without ever mentioning a snake. An extended metaphor stretches a single image across several sentences: his example cast education as fuel in a gas tank, with some days spent cruising the highway and others stuck in the mud. And a dead metaphor is one so worn from overuse that it stopped registering as figurative language at all: the "foot" of a bed, the "hands" of a clock, phrases that now just function as the literal names for things.

Mr. Ben also reached for a different comparison to explain how metaphor works on a reader emotionally, describing a character as "a shark among minnows" instead of walking through a paragraph of adjectives like ruthless or emotionless. One image, he said, does the work of the whole paragraph.

When Your Metaphor Doesn't Land the Way You Meant It

Metaphors can also misfire, and Mr. Ben offered his own example to prove it. Trying to compliment Josiah as tough, durable, and able to survive in harsh conditions, he settled on a single line: "Josiah, that guy's a cactus." The problem is that a cactus doesn't read as resilient to most listeners. It reads as prickly and irritating. "What's obvious to you," he said, "is not always so obvious to somebody else. And metaphors carry power."

That same double edge showed up when the hosts asked the pair to unpack "love is a battlefield." Mr. Jason read it as a warning: a battlefield is full of hidden mines and artillery, and a relationship that feels like one means constantly bracing to avoid getting hurt rather than feeling safe. Mr. Ben read it differently: a battlefield is also where bravery and hope get tested under pressure, which makes the same metaphor a case for resilience rather than danger. Neither reading canceled the other out. That was the point: the same image can cut two directions depending on which half of it a listener holds onto, which is exactly why Mr. Jason's earlier warning about war language in business matters. A metaphor doesn't come with instructions for how to take it. Whoever hears it fills in the rest.