In an interview with a manager in a declining industry, the manager talked of his fear that so many individuals would be made redundant that the organization would become ‘anorexic’—that is, too thin to function when an upturn in business came about. Some academics and management practitioners (Tyler and Wilkinson, 2007) use slimming metaphors to talk about downsizing, delayering, and redundancy. Burrell (1992) talks of ‘corporate liposuction’, within which senior managers have to ‘slim down’ the ‘bulky’ middle layers of the organization. When all is lost—the organization has failed or closed—the metaphor of death has been used (Bell and Taylor, 2011).

What metaphors have you heard used recently to describe an organization and events?