Why 'We're At War' Means You're About to Get Screwed

Video Transcript

We need to rally the troops because everyone is in the trenches and they all have battle scars because they're right on the front lines and they're taking one for the team so that you don't have to. Does this sound familiar? These are not phrases that I first encountered while fighting in a war. I've never actually been in a war or even remotely close to one.

I've never been in actual trenches. I've never had to rally the troops in an army hurtling towards their death. I've never [snorts] been shot, stabbed, or injured in battle. And I don't have the battle scars to prove just that.

I've never felt the fear of being on the front lines with an enemy approaching. And I've never had to take a bullet for my team. But I have come across and used these war analogies in business. And I've learned to hate these empty and insulting cliches.

In this video, I'm going to explain why these analogies are used, why they're tricking you into doing more work for less pay, and what you should do when you hear them in your next meeting. The act of war has been weaponized in boardrooms and cubicles, on Zoom calls, and all hand meetings. Leaders everywhere lean on these war cries when they are out of incentives, out of options, and out of ideas for how to motivate their teams. And I think it's time that we stop using these phrases to motivate people who are not fearing for their lives.

Work should not make you fear for your life. And if it does, there is a much bigger problem at hand. Work should not motivate you to pick up arms, to fight, to provoke violence, or abide by the Geneva Convention. Work framed as war gets you to stay late.

Work framed as war gets you to work on weekends. Work framed as war gets you to push a little bit harder for a little bit longer with a lot less pay. Work should never go there. And if it does, you should start to recognize the desperation in your leadership and the panic in top management.

As thinking humans employees managers and individuals, we are all guilty of sitting in the comfort of our own homes and offices or cubicles while publicly berating nations for their wars that they are fighting. real wars with real death and real winners and losers. While we sit in the comfort of our own homes and critique their desperate attempts to stay alive, there are countries literally fighting to exist and groups of people who are literally fighting to keep their entire culture from being wiped off the face of the earth while there are business leaders telling their teams that they are at war too. But at war with whom?

And why? And when is this war over, Mr. CEO? These are the same people who believe it's appropriate to equate the search for a new client or the pursuit of a ridiculous deadline to picking up arms and defending ground for your life.

[snorts] This is absurd and insulting and at worst a manipulative and underhanded tactic to push people past breaking point. Management and leadership pull on these analogies when everything else is failing them. When regular words don't work, when mission statements are shallow, when vision statements become unclear and irrelevant, when the dayto-day of the business isn't panning out the way that leadership expected, they lean on war analogies. They revert to war because they have nothing left in their bag of tricks.

It's the easy way out in desperate times. And the yes man managers who go along with it are like the generals agreeing to follow orders because the orders were given by someone higher up, not because they agree with them or believe in them. Instead of trying to rebuild trust, fix what's broken, and reestablish sane norms that can scale and survive. These leaders lean on cheap tricks in human psychology to push people further, faster, and for less.

Look at Uber at peak war mode when Travis Kalanick was basically at war with everyone and everything around him. Once he left, they had to rename his war room to the peace room. And Ariana Huffington, one of the Uber board members, has said that it was totally a symbolic gesture, but sometimes symbolism matters. Jason Frerieded and DHH at Base Camp have always rejected the idea that business is war.

We come in peace is how they approach business. And I really do love that you can build a business from a position of peace and cooperation. You don't [snorts] have to beat someone to win at business. Wars are only won if the opposition loses.

And more often than not, that's not how business works. It's not a zero- sum game. It's not binary. It's not life and death.

Early in my career, I felt like every interaction was a battle and that there had to be a winner, me and there had to be a loser, anyone else. As I've matured, I've experienced some pretty intense business battles. And I I look back and I've never really felt the need to equate my experiences to that of someone who's being shot at and fears for their lives. Many years ago, one of my businesses was sold behind my back.

Now, that was a bit of a dick move, but it wasn't war. Nobody died. Nobody was shot, stabbed, or injured, even emotionally, for too long. Hell, I even made money out of that sale.

So, how could it have been a war? Leaders who reach for war language usually aren't short of villains. They're short of real incentives and better solutions. War talk is lazy.

War talk is cheap and easy, and it never affects the generals or their lives. It's always a rally cry for the foot soldiers to do more, for the foot soldiers to change tactics, for the foot soldiers to work harder and fight with more passion. I've been there myself. For a period in my career, I was hired as a wartime CEO to go into businesses and ruthlessly cut them down until they were profitable.

And I was good at it, too. And I thrived on the panic and the stress and the hostile environments. But almost always these businesses were unable to survive in the long term because the culture was rotten from the inside. And a fish rots from the head.

And if the head is at war, the body will follow. It's easy to get sucked into a war story because it's an easy one to relate to. Deep down. We all want an opponent.

We all want someone to fight with, someone to blame, and someone to beat. But it's easy because it's lazy. And you don't have to engage in it. You're allowed to choose other words if you don't like the war analogies.

You're allowed to recognize that usually the war is only fought when a company is backed into a corner. Usually a company is backed into a corner, not because of the foot soldiers, but because of a string of bad decisions or variables over a long period of time, often before you even joined the company. So the people who caused the war often don't end up even fighting in it. You're probably one of these people right now.

So, what I'm hoping for is that when you hear these war analogies, you start to hear them differently. They hit your ear in a different way. You hear them not as a war cry, but as a trick or manipulation because your leaders don't think you're smart or capable enough to solve the real problems in the organization. The road maps being too full, the deadlines being too short, business models failing, vision statements no longer viable, mission statements no longer relevant, management incompetent, strategic fumbles.

Instead, just work harder because we're at war. But Nick, it's just a figure of speech. Oh, come on, Nick. Everybody knows we're not actually at war.

Yeah, these are two very common responses I hear to my complaints. But if it's just a figure of speech, and if nobody believes we're at war, then you don't need to use the tired and lazy analogies. Use better ones. Be better.

Be more inspirational. Use first principles. And think about why you need to incite war instead of solving the root problems that improve your culture. Some company cultures openly and outwardly admit that business is war for them.

And that is totally fine too because it's baked into their existence from the very beginning. It's not tacked on at the end when things are desperate. You join knowing this when you join a company like that and embracing this because this is the culture you want and the environment you love and thrive within. That makes sense to me in this context.

like Snowflake CEO Frank Snootman who has openly said business is war and built a demanding high-erforming culture on that premise from the start. But ultimately a culture that embraces the war analogy treats people like governments treat soldiers. Soldiers are expendable. Soldiers are a resource.

Soldiers can be lost [music] and more can just be brought in. Why do you think companies have a head count? That's a war term and it's your head. McKenzie's own 1997 war for talent framework is now argued by critics to have produced nearly three decades of an adversarial hiring culture that trained companies to treat their own work workforces as an external enemy to be captured.

I believe that words matter and the rest of society agrees on this point because freedom of speech debates rage continuously in the world right now and today. Since the me too movement, the world at large has become painfully aware of the engendered terms we use all the time in business and elsewhere. We have made a very conscious choice in the workplace to stop using certain phrases like chairman, salesman, manpower, manh hours, best man for the job. All of these are specifically about men performing at work and don't apply across the board anymore.

We need more descriptive language, right? And we're using it. So, I don't see how this is any different. If we agree that these terms are damaging and harmful, then we should rally and stop using them, find new ones, and challenge leaders when they are lazy and invoke the act of killing people to incite deeper work and further loyalty to a business that is already paying you a fair wage for a fair exchange of your time and effort.

So, here's what you can do the next time someone uses the war analogy. Ask them who we're at war with and when it ends. Ask them if we get extra provisions or pay for this extra time we're spending at war. Ask them what a successful end to the war looks like and how many casualties they expect and if you're one of them.

Ask the leadership what their wartime rules are and the strategies that are going to be employed. Or better yet, just ask them to choose a better analogy. Because for most people and most businesses in the world, work is not war. Work is just work.