“Blast Radius”, “Crushing It” and “Wartime CEOS”: The Pros and Cons of Violent Metaphors
I was introduced to a new term the other week: “blast radius”. “Blast radius” refers to the breadth of influence and power of a role, or person.
Well, we get it! A person with a large blast radius can cause a lot of damage, generate massive heat and light, burn the people around them to a crisp, lay waste to an enormous area. Not only that, the threat that they might “go off” is a serious one: the recovery we might have to go through is considerable. We might treat a person with a large blast radius rather carefully.
Metaphors are interesting. Their intent is to convey emotion by connecting something we are describing with a whole universe of feelings from elsewhere. “Lovely as a summer’s day” — mmm, warm, golden, inviting, fleeting. “Sharp as a tack” — a short sensation, but a memorable one, we need to pay attention to something sharp, we’d better be careful. “This quintessence of dust” — the whole human race as essential, fleeting and meaningless in four words.
So on encountering “blast radius” I started thinking about how much we tend to use violent metaphors in the tech world (and outside, probably). Heck, my own mini-bio refers to “killer engineering teams” — the successful, intense groups I’ve worked with from time to time.
Why do we do it? Do they work (apparently so, because we keep doing it)?
Quibbling with Bill Campbell and Ben Horowitz probably means I’m going out on a limb, but there’s a whole chapter in The Hard Thing About Hard Things dedicated to a violent metaphor: the Wartime CEO. Which stems from Bill Campbell’s comment to Ben Horowitz that he was the only CEO he knew who could be both a successful Wartime CEO and Peacetime CEO.
The sense of the chapter is that there are times when the company is under enough existential threat that Special Powers are needed. A Peacetime CEO “rarely does not raise her voice”. A Wartime CEO “rarely speaks in a normal voice”. “Peacetime CEO focuses on the big picture and empowers her people to make detailed decisions. Wartime CEO cares about a speck of dust on a gnat’s ass if it interferes with the prime directive”.
The Special Powers are both behavioral (swearing, fast decisions) and strategic (being paranoid, determined focus).
So what is the metaphor communicating? What is war? (An aside: I have absolutely no direct idea of the experience, having grown up in one of the luckiest generations ever to walk the earth).
War is special, a time out of time — the normal rules of life are voided, the intensity is everything, the end results are valued above all, hurts, even quite serious hurts, are tolerated because the stakes are enormously high: we will survive, or we won’t.
War is savage, destructive. We allow ourselves off the leash. Behavior that would otherwise be horrific is allowed, if not actively encouraged.
So it’s a great metaphor for getting things done. “We’re in a special time”, it says. “The old rules are no longer in place” and “we must do everything necessary because our very survival is at stake”.
I get it. God knows I haven’t operated at the level of Bill Campbell and Ben Horowitz, but I’ve done my fair share of turnarounds, beaten back competition, successfully shipped stuff that looked dead on the carpet a few months before it was supposed to go out. At times (more than a few), I recognize my own “wartime” behavior.
Being able to generate a monster level of intensity (“monster”? see — it’s hard to avoid) at the right time is an incredibly valuable skill. Being able to ruthlessly cut out everything that is unnecessary (“ruthlessly cut out”!) and stick to what remains can be a tough, unrelenting process.
But war? No, it’s not war. And my guess is that using war as a metaphor allows a degree of unnecessary shitty behavior. Yes, raising the intensity for an entire organization without swearing, or banging the table is a tricky skill to learn, but invoking “wartime” provides a great excuse not to bother.
(And, of course, until recently, war was pretty much an exclusively male occupation. Do female CEOs identify with being “Wartime CEOs”? Does it have the same power?).
I like “crushing it”, I have to say. It has a pleasant sense of immediate and destructive action on something that is not putting up much resistence. Like a coke can. We don’t often “crush” people, and when we do, it’s not literal. Maybe if I thought of bugs on the ground when I end up “crushing it” I’d be a bit more squeamish about it. But I don’t.
“Killing it”, well, there’s the violence again. “Killing it” means something is now dead that was alive. It’s certainly final, the spike in the end-zone, the situation absolutely complete, done — which is why it’s attractive to use, I guess. If we “killed it”, we achieved absolute success.
And, sure, “killing it” has been around so long that maybe it means nothing. But still…
Don’t get me wrong. I’m all for intensity. Intensity, focus, concentration, jacking up the stakes — these are all necessary leadership tools for our incredibly competitive and wickedly fast industry.
And metaphors are a fabulous way of conveying emotion (intensity is an emotional state). But they work because they communicate an entire world of implications. “War”, and “killing” and “blast radius” get the intensity across by alluding to violence and destruction, life and death.
They’re fun! They make the game we’re playing (make more money than we spend, grow faster than the other teams!) higher stakes. They make our contributions feel more important, vital even.
I just wonder if we can come up with some better ones. Metaphors that move us to take huge risks and push hard for monumentally great work without standing on our collective human history of aggression.
(If you are a founder, manager or technical leader interested and would like to talk further about your hiring process and coaching, get in touch!)
“Blast Radius”, “Crushing It” and “Wartime CEOS”: The Pros and Cons of Violent Metaphors
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