Use of the Dinosaur Metaphor for Business Is a Beastly Injustice

Pity the dinosaurs.

For decades, they have been mocked by a cultural elite that just doesn’t get it. Pick up a copy of the Economist, Fortune or any business publication and you will invariably see once-proud companies ranging from General Motors to IBM maligned by writers and business school gurus as dinosaurs. Indeed, wherever innovation is discussed, they are shamefully exploited as the hapless symbol of lumbering, pea-brained incompetence.

This is wrong. A comprehensive database survey of business periodicals reveals that dinosaurs have become the media metaphor of choice to describe U.S. industries and companies that are too stupid to survive. It now appears, however, that nothing could be further from the truth.

Over the last decade, the scientific community has amassed persuasive evidence demonstrating not only that the thunder lizards weren’t reptilian twits but that their mass extinction was--quite literally--an unexpected bolt from the blue. In light of this new knowledge, dinosaur-bashing is nothing short of mean-spirited libel.

The continued survival of the factually flawed dinosaur-as-moron metaphor illustrates how business often sticks to outmoded ideas even in the face of new evidence. The business implication of being called a dinosaur is now evolving.

“Clearly, the metaphor comes from our immodest sense of superiority,” asserts paleontologist David B. Weishampel, an associate professor of anatomy at Johns Hopkins Medical School and vice president of the Dinosaur Society--sort of a Dinosaur Anti-Defamation League. “The notion that dinosaurs had tiny brains and thus were stupid and that stupidity equals extinction has been effectively overthrown.”

In fact, says Weishampel, whose master’s thesis was on dinosaur vocalization and whose doctoral dissertation explored jaw mechanics in ornithopods (duck-billed dinosaurs and iguanodons), dinosaur brains were more than adequate to cope with the challenges of Cretaceous-era living. “Dinosaurs weren’t stupid,” he notes, “they exhibited many sophisticated behaviors, including parental care and herding. But we’ll probably have to wait for the media to savvy up on this.”

Adds University of Chicago paleontologist David M. Raup, author of “Extinction: Bad Genes or Bad Luck?”: “Dinosaurs were happy, successful and (biologically) innovative for over 150 million years. The real question is whether they did anything wrong?”

Increasingly, the consensus is growing that the dinosaurs were peaceably minding their own business, gobbling up our mammalian ancestors and grazing on the local vegetation, until a meteor the size of Disney World slammed into the Earth near Mexico about 65 million years ago.

While there is still some debate as to whether the asteroid effectively killed the dinosaurs or merely administered a celestial coup de grace to an already dying species, paleontologist Weishampel wryly observes, “No one would deny that it was a hell of a bad thing to happen.”

Indeed, Chicago’s Raup and a growing community of paleontologists now believe that most of the mass extinctions in evolutionary history might be explained by the cataclysmic impact of asteroids.

This has potentially shattering consequences for the dinosaur metaphor. Instead of being perceived as victims of their own stupidity, dinosaurs are merely victims; creatures who never knew that their sky was falling.

So consider: When a business or industry is described as a “dinosaur,” the image conjured up won’t be one of a dumb, hulking reptile unable to compete with those clever mammals. Rather, it will be of a proud Allosaurus or Tyrannosaurus rex that literally never knew what hit it. This is a considerably nobler image.

Perhaps this will be a metaphor that American business will prefer. Being called a dinosaur will be more of a compliment than an insult. How can any business or industry be expected to meaningfully cope with the fiery impact and debris of a massive meteor striking their marketplace? They can’t. That’s simply unrealistic.

The horrible lesson here is that businesses and industries that now teeter on the brink of economic extinction are--in pure evolutionary terms--simply dumber than the dinosaurs. There’s no sudden impact--no asteroid--to blame.

The challenges they’ve fumbled have taken years--not seconds--to evolve.

For now, though, it’s time for the corporate speech writers, business schools and financial media to make the dinosaur metaphor extinct.