Russell Bell: From the Perfect Storm to Groundhog Day, how movies tell business stories

George Clooney in a scene from the film The Perfect Storm. Photo / File

It was nice to receive feedback from last week's article and also gratifying to hear that many people agreed with the themes of it. One piece of feedback likened the business environment/current fear in the community as a product of a perfect storm of factors. And I decided that rather than dive into another critique of policy – which is now clearly "let it rip", with the recent surprise opening of the borders – I thought I would do something different this week and explore how movies have influenced how we describe our business sector.

The Perfect Storm was a 2000 film starring George Clooney, which told the story of the fishing vessel Andrea Gail and how it was lost because of the unusual confluence of a hurricane and two severe weather fronts. It is a commonly used term to describe when multiple factors affect an undertaking. However, being used often - even in sports commentary - it doesn't do justice to the story behind it as there are very few situations that are perfect or cause the same catastrophic destruction to a business endeavour.

Groundhog Day is used to describe situations that feel like they have happened before. I have heard this applied to many situations in a business environment which, surprisingly, are nothing like the events that preceded them. The actual ceremony the movie is based on is about how an animal reacts to seeing its shadow and, on that basis, a determination - in no way based in fact - on how long winter will last is made. The movie is about a man trapped in a time vortex until he does everything right – the last part of that (correcting your mistakes) is lost on people who use this term to describe mere coincidences.

Any movie title containing the word "wave" tends to get dragged up to describe the current pandemic. Personally, I would like to reclaim the word 'wave' and give it back to the ocean.

Recently I attended a course on marketing where the instructor described how you should react with speed to opportunities like the Quick and the Dead. I could see where she was going with the analogy but if there was any chance that you'd be killed in the pursuit of a sale you'd probably want to avoid that situation. She went on to describe a failure of her PowerPoint presentation as a glitch in the Matrix – so clearly a movie fan.

We're also not immune to TV show titles and storylines being acquired to describe situations. For example, an end-of-season clearance is the Sale of the Century, and I have probably lost count of the number of times that I have been in a meeting and thought Beam me up, Scotty. Then, there is Jumping the Shark which describes when a TV show's quality declines (based on an infamous Happy Days episode when the Fonz literally jumped a shark, for reasons best left to 1970s scriptwriters) – I once sat in on a meeting about a product line where this term was used by a sales manager to describe recent sales performance, it took ten minutes to explain the reference and get the meeting back on track.

But sometimes, simple plot lines are used to describe business situations. Although unrelated to a particular movie or TV series, my all-time favourite (with ties to Aladdin) is the statement "we can't let the inflation genie out of the bottle" which clearly has occurred. But probably the most recent and applicable to the time that we are in is the term (and title of a 1976 movie) – through the looking glass. This has come to mean, or be interpreted as, events are occurring that are not expected – and this probably describes the past 24 months quite well, and potentially the months to come.