Hello and welcome back to the Jerome Meadows Experience, today we are going to be looking at metaphors relating to business and fishing.
There was a book written by W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne, back in 2005 called Blue Ocean Strategy.
The ocean in this case is the marketplace.
The idea was that markets are either calm, or full of sharks. The blue ocean being markets with very little competition and the red ocean being red with the blood of a thousand dead fishermen.
Sharks are predators. They hunt and they kill fish as well as fishermen. So sharks represent fiercely competitive businessmen.
A loan shark for example is an individual who lends people money. They usually lend money to people who can’t get loans in banks. But they charge an extremely high interest rate. And if you can’t pay them back, well… they break your legs with a baseball bat.
There was a TV show called “SHARK TANK” that first aired in 2009. The sharks were investors and people would try to get these sharks to invest in their businesses. But the sharks were often very cruel and competitive
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Fish are customers… This is pretty obvious really.
But an important customer is also called a big fish.
Even bigger than a big fish is a whale.
So, if you are managing a casino, or an online video game you might have some small fish who come and spend a few euros every now and then
But you take very good care of the whales.
Whales are the people who spend thousands of euros on an online game or hundreds of thousands in casinos.
If a business is failing we might say that the business is going under! This means the business is filling with water and is going to sink… or fail.
One thing that can happen when a ship fills with water, is they will need to remove the water quickly. This is called bailing out water.
If an important business is failing they can ask the government to bail them out. This means that the government takes tax money and gives it to the business so it doesn’t go under.. Or fail
Many banks required bailouts during the 2008 real estate bubble
A few airlines needed bailouts after the 2019 pandemic too.
So these are just some of the metaphors we use to link business and fishing.
And finally, I will leave you with a well-known proverb.
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