When business is looked upon as a battle, it becomes the ceaseless organizing and expending of resources for the purpose of defeating the competition, considered as the enemy. The world is very simple here and very intense. Shakespeare captures the mood when he has one of his characters say:

Let me have war, say I; it exceeds peace as far as day does night; it's spritely, waking, audible, and full of vent. Peace is a very apoplexy, lethargy; mull'd, deaf, sleepy, insensible; a getter of more bastard children than war's a destroyer of menŠand it makes men hate one another. Reason: because they then less need one another.

There are two ways in which people really do need each other in war. They need some people to be their compatriots, and others to be their enemies. Without an enemy the army has no reason to march, the navy to float, the air force to fly, nor the business person to go off to the corporate wars in the morning. If the taste for war is alive, the need for a good sound enemy will be as well. And then that warrior will be fortunate who can tell friend from foe, since the desire for a foe is almost enough by itself to create one. The best business warrior will identify as enemies those who really pose a threat to the business. And he or she will resist seeing a convenient enemy in anyone who happens to be vulnerable to attack.

The battle mentality in business is oriented above all to action, the more aggressive the better. The essential trick in this metaphorical world is to know whether there is an emergency at hand or not. If business conditions really are at crisis pitch, or could quickly become so, then a battle mentality is the only sane one to have. But frequently conditions are not nearly so dire, yet business people keep on acting as though they were in the midst of the heat and the smoke. Why? Because however dangerous such a world may be, it is comfortingly simple. Action becomes a far more accessible alternative than thought.

People are spoken of in the business version of the warrior culture as they are in armies, navies, and air forces — that is, primarily in terms of their tactical significance. They are thought of as the fulfillers of precisely defined functions. Although warriors speak of teamwork as much as athletes do, they mean something different by it. The teamwork of the warrior lies simply in belonging to one's unit, which both preexisted and outlasts oneself and for the most part is unaffected by one's passing through it except so far as morale may have gone up or down while one was there. But otherwise an individual has little effect on the purposes of the team or on its methods. Individuality is not a value when the scene is a battlefield, no matter what the movies show to the contrary. Here loyalty means more than charm and good looks, obedience more than inspiration, and courage more than originality.

For this reason, the religious words used in business have been included in the warrior's vocabulary list. As Machiavelli understood long ago, Religion too, and the oath soldiers took when they were enlisted, greatly contributed to making them do their duty. Here, religion is not the priest out blessing farmers' fields of corn. It is the priest inspiring and justifying what happens on the killing fields.

In this world, thought is strategic or tactical. It is directed toward achieving an advantage over the enemy, rather than being disinterested as in science or creative as in art. At its worst, thought falls to a merely conventionalized and rigid level. Communication here, at its best, means issuing a clear command that others will obey. At worst, it is pompous gobbledygook. Actions at their best are aggressive, at their worst stupidly so; and no words are wasted to talk about deeds that are mild. Everything on the battlefield feels dangerous, but simple; simple, but exciting.

Since failure is something that, in a war setting, is not supposed to happen, it is surprising that there are so many words for it in the vocabulary of the business warrior. Perhaps their relative abundance reveals something otherwise hidden in the heroic thrusts against the enemy — that one is moved not exclusively by the passion for valor, but as much by the fear of defeat. Sometimes the medals go to those who merely lost the least.

Warriors in business — as in armies — are there to implement plans, to overcome inertia, to maintain discipline and control, and to sustain unusually high energy levels under conditions of great stress, all for the sake of defeating foes. They are especially useful when talking about vanquishing competitors, capturing market share, or about executing a new strategy against internal corporate resistances and entrenched interests. The warrior's mentality, however, is self-defeating when it needs to express something positive about compromise or negotiation. "Win-win" can't even be thought of within the terms available to the warrior, except perhaps as one of the kinds of defeat. And, viewed from within the perspective of this metaphor, leadership is all of one kind: Teddy Roosevelt's as he led the charge up the hill at San Juan, sword aloft.

Most of the words in the battle metaphor are used frequently in work having directly or indirectly to do with marketing or sales. Their value often lies in stimulating sales people to energetic commitment to the performance of impossible feats of valor, the more extreme the foes lined up against them the better. Crisis is seen as an early stage of victory. In fact, the whole mentality depends on a sense of crisis and on the imminent possibility of real doom. Emergency is the very air the warrior breathes and loves.

It is not surprising that the warrior's is the most popular culture in business. The most frequently found business person is no farmer, nor a regulator of engines, nor a player of symbolic games, nor a builder of houses. Give him an enemy, and he has found a purpose. There are many who crave the simplicity and who love the vigor of fighting the good fight and of besting their worst enemies.