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In the News: Using Analogies to Teach Business Literacy

  
  
  

PRIZIM Inc. (Olde Towne Gaithersburg, MD)

QA: A Homegrown Approach to Business Literacy, one in a series of ESOP articles in the Wall Street Journal, discusses how PRIZIM Inc., an environmental and sustainability consulting firm, used analogies to teach business literacy to its employees. After considering other business literacy tools, like hiring outside consultants or following the Great Game of Business, they decided to use analogies

"They began using analogies to make key points, such as "going fishing" for marketing or "bagging a trophy" for winning a new contract, and soon were brainstorming models for talking about their business in a way everyone could understand"

While the analogy concept was working, the needed to find one analogy that would apply to everyone:

"So we started to use analogies. Marketing was like going fishing, and we would talk about what kind of bait we would use to get the fish to bite, what kind of fish to catch. People understood that….When we started sorting things out, none of other models worked….The dairy farm does it better. You didn't have to kill anything. It's about the right number of people. There are different product lines: ice cream, yogurt, cheese."

The article also discusses the problems with using this approach and why the company was reorganized.

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