The Battle Cry in the Boardroom

In the weeks following the US and Israeli strikes on Iran, the most powerful office in the world discovered war memes. Montages of gore, bombing, and killing—spliced with film clips and music—posted with the ease of someone forwarding a cricket highlight.

I had seen it before. Not in war, but in sales conferences in hotel ballrooms across the country. The scale was different. The grammar was not.

Bengaluru. Mumbai. Gurgaon. The lights dimmed. Gladiator on a 20-foot screen. The general who became a slave who became a gladiator, dispatched enemies with a sword—blood, sand, and the roar of 50,000 Romans. Then a sales leader at the lectern, voice rising to meet the moment: This year, we crush them.

The room erupted. I considered my career choices. Again.

Nobody in that room was going to face a lion or behead anyone. They were going to sell paint. Or insurance. Or fertiliser. Or sweet-talk a distributor in Nanded into taking on more stock than he planned. Genuinely important work. But work that has never once required a sword.

The point is not what the leader posted or what the sales head said. The point is that the grammar was identical. The same images. The same emotional instruction. The same picture of the world being handed to the room.

War footage was not motivation. It was never just motivation. It was instruction. And unlike motivation, instruction does not fade by Monday morning.

When competition becomes war, everything else disappears.

The System Being Installed

To understand why this matters, it helps to understand how metaphors actually work.

In 1980, linguist George Lakoff and philosopher Mark Johnson published Metaphors We Live By. Their argument was simple: metaphors are not decoration. They are the system through which we think and act. We do not just describe things in certain terms. We begin to think—and behave—in those terms.

Their example was ARGUMENT IS WAR. We do not merely describe arguments in military language. We conduct them that way. We attack positions. We defend ground. We demolish reasoning.

The language is not poetic. It is literal. And because it is literal, it shapes what we do.

Consider what changes when a salesperson genuinely believes they are in a war. They stop listening for what the customer needs. They start looking for the opening to close. They read hesitation as resistance to be overcome rather than a question worth understanding. They win the argument and lose the relationship.

The metaphor did not describe the interaction. It determined it.

The metaphor is not running in the background. It is running the show.

Now consider what happens when an organisation installs COMPETITION IS WAR as its operating frame—not just in one conference, but across its language, rituals, rewards, and stories about who gets promoted.

Open any newspaper on any given day. A minister fires back at a rival. A CEO slaps a lawsuit on a competitor. A startup battles for market share. A court judgment strikes down a law. Nobody notices this as war language anymore. It has become invisible.

And invisible language is the most powerful kind—because it shapes thinking without anyone noticing.

As management scholar Gareth Morgan showed in Images of Organisation (1986), the metaphors leaders use are never neutral. Each one highlights certain things and hides others.

A war metaphor highlights territory, threat, and beating opponents. What it hides is just as important. It hides ambiguity. It hides the uncomfortable question. It hides the customer who has not yet decided they are unhappy, and the competitor who does not yet look like a threat.

War language has no word for these things. So inside the organisation, they gradually stop existing—not because they are absent from the market, but because the frame has no place to put them.

That is how a metaphor becomes a blind spot.

The metaphor is not running in the background. It is running the show.

When the Frontline Stops Thinking

The war frame does something else as well. It divides the organisation the way armies are divided. Generals think. Soldiers execute.

That division makes sense in a war. Speed of command matters. Deviation is dangerous. Obedience keeps people alive.

Inside a market-facing organisation, however, the same division is quietly catastrophic.

When every decision routes upward, and execution becomes the only expectation, people stop thinking. Not because they cannot. But because the frame has told them—clearly and repeatedly—that thinking is not their job.

So they look up the hierarchy for direction. They wait for the signal before moving. Initiative starts to feel like risk. Questions start to feel like insubordination. Waiting starts to look like competence.

In the short term, this produces real gains. Clear orders. Fast execution. Measurable output. The numbers go up. The war footage at next year’s conference gets a bigger cheer.

But here is what those numbers do not show.

The frontline is where the market actually lives. It is where the customer says something unexpected. Where the competitor’s new approach first appears in a real conversation. Where early signals surface before they become a crisis on a dashboard.

When the frontline stops thinking and starts waiting, the organisation loses its early warning system. It keeps moving with precision and confidence—in a direction the market has quietly stopped caring about.

The efficiency gain shows up in the next quarter. The intelligence loss shows up as strategic surprise five years later.

The Leader the Language Selects

That is not a chain of command. It is a closed loop.

Over time, this produces a particular kind of leader.

War cultures do not set out to create authoritarian organisations. They drift toward them. The process is gradual, logical, and almost invisible while it is happening.

The frame rewards the most commanding figure in the room. The one who performs certainty best. Who speaks in declarations rather than questions. Who reads dissent as disloyalty and ambiguity as weakness.

That person gets promoted. Their style gets read as leadership. Others learn to copy it.

The uncomfortable truth is that this leader often delivers—at least at first. Market share climbs. Targets get hit. The board is pleased. The conference gets louder. The frame appears validated.

What the annual report does not show is what the organisation is quietly losing. The talented people who leave because they stopped being asked anything worth answering. The customer insight that never surfaced because the team was watching the competitor instead of the market. The innovation that never happened because the room where someone might have raised an inconvenient question had been replaced by a briefing.

Then comes the cost that compounds across generations.

War cultures train the next generation of leaders in the only model they have ever seen rewarded. Rising talent learns to follow orders. To look up the hierarchy for permission. To wait for the signal before moving.

The leader who asks “are we sure about this?” does not get the next promotion.

So the organisation gradually stops producing the leaders it will eventually need. The pipeline fills with capable performers of a single style. Nobody below is asking questions. Nobody above is getting the information that would tell them something is wrong.

That is not a chain of command. It is a closed loop.

And closed loops, in markets that keep changing, are how organisations become suddenly—and catastrophically—obsolete.

War language built this. One metaphor at a time. One promoted general at a time.

The leaders who built something durable were rarely the most commanding people in the room. They were the most curious. They rewarded questions over declarations. They understood that markets, unlike wars, do not end.

The competitor across the table today may be the acquisition target, the partner, or the talent pool needed in five years. Seeing that requires a different kind of thinking. It requires the capacity to sit with complexity rather than resolve it prematurely.

That capacity is a muscle. War language, sustained over years, quietly lets it atrophy.

The Architecture Nobody Voted For

Artist Baptist Coelho uses bandages as a meditation on war’s wounds—injuries covered before they are healed, invisible because they are wrapped.

Organisations work the same way.

They do not know what they have become until something forces the bandage off. A lost client. A talent exodus. A strategy that made perfect sense inside the war room—and none at all in the market.

By then, the costs are no longer delayed. They are simply due.

The war footage felt like energy. It was architecture.

It built the culture, the blind spots, the leadership pipeline, and the closed loop—all at once, and all invisibly.

The sales conference will come around again. The screen will light up. Gladiator will ride out once more.

Before you reach for play, understand what you are actually building.