When I was in charge of the LPSS program I received a lot of training on management principles, business cases and plans, and related subjects. One message in this training was to emphasize the utility of phrases like "the Netflix of learning" in plans. This was because senior executive needed to be able to comprehend the idea quickly, and such metaphors were the surest shortest path to accomplish this. Now to be sure, there are weaknesses in this approach, which are made very clear in this post from Martin Weller. He dissects the problem with metaphors like "the Uber of such-and-such". I would say, though, that almost any metaphor will fail under close scrutiny. What makes a metaphor work is salience - the one feature of the example that shines through clearly. In the Uber case, for example, you should ignore most of the business model and focus on the fact that, unlike a taxi, you don't need an expensive taxi plate to drive an Uber (the one thing Weller actually misses in his dissection).
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