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.