Metaphors We Live By

The argument that metaphor is not a literary ornament but the fundamental structure of human thought. We think in metaphors — argument is war, time is money, organisations are machines — and these frames shape what we can see and what we cannot. For product people who write strategy documents, name features, and frame problems for teams: the tools of framing are the tools of thinking. Lakoff and Johnson demonstrate that choosing a metaphor is never a neutral act; it determines which aspects of a problem become visible and which disappear. This book explains why the language a team uses is not decoration but infrastructure.