A "wartime" business person is a hilarious idea. Gotta feel manly somehow, I guess!
It suggests that people play out roles in the Drama Triangle (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ovrVv_RlCMw) instead of focusing on building things, solving problems, and helping each other learn.
At a previous company I worked at, they took this even further, organizing themselves into "squads" (teams) which were part of "platoons" (orgs). Someone that interviewed pointed out that this was pretty aggressive/warlike terminology and wondered why they used it and they didn't really have a good answer.
(Of course that doesn't stop people from cargo-culting the military without thought given to the specific context.)
"Platoon" feels pretty out of place. I'd have trouble not laughing every time I said it.
Veterans who are used to the terms?
Because, ultimately what people choose to value is subjective, and there’s no right or wrong.
Put another way, what you perceive as valuable is equally hilarious from many others’ valid perspectives.
As long as they’re not hurting anyone, people are free to choose their own adventure.
The idea of a “wartime” person is anchored in machismo. It romanticizes, and excuses, really crappy behavior that is long-term destructive.
Calling something a “war” is a convenient justification for all sorts of terrible, foolish actions. The “war on drugs” or the “war on cancer” are good examples. Cancer doctors would try to one up each other in how extreme they could be in their treatment of breast cancer, and it turns out a lot of those tactics, such as literally tearing out pectoral muscles down to the bone, don’t actually help patient survival. But the “wartime” framing made that kind of action without thinking okay.
So I disagree that framing things as if they are war doesn’t hurt anyone. It has. And the framing deserves critical attention, so we can find a better framing for a challenging time that requires sacrifice and effort that doesn’t turn into “the ends justify the means.”
EDIt: More on [reframing the war on cancer](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8749321/) and why it can be harmful.
the idea that Page needed to step up as "wartime consigliere/CEO" in 2011 because Google was staring down existential threat if it didn't do stuff drastically differently to stave of the threat from social media is also quite funny in hindsight.