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by blahblahblah 6250 days ago
Please resist the temptation to describe corporate pathology by means of bad analogies with medical pathology. You're making me cringe.
1 comments

I thought that atherosclerotic had passed from analogy to just flat-out insult.

I like making you cringe.

My point is that such a statement is absolute nonsense; it conveys no information at all. You might as well have been discussing the "jabberwockyness" of a company. What would it even mean for a company have atherosclerosis? In what sense could a company be said to be stenotic? What elements of the company would correspond to the various components of arterial plaque? What about a company could be said to correspond to a transient ischemic attack? How could you identify a company whose 'plaque' is characterized by the presence of lipid-rich necrotic core vs. one that has juxtaluminal hemorrhage or one that is calcified? Can you mitigate the symptoms of an atherosclerotic company via administration of rt-PA or via endarterectomy? No obvious analogues for these features of atherosclerosis exist in the context of a company. The analogy is not just a leaky abstraction; it's a broken one.