CorporateNature Metaphor Series, No 85
The software on modern commercial planes is designed to avoid "stall" at all costs: once a plane stalls, it becomes difficult to control and starts dropping like a brick or spinning towards the ground. The two recent Boeing 737 Max crashes are an unfortunate corollary of having systems so heavily focused on preventing stall.
In human careers, you can also see this (almost deadly) effect of stall. Once someone becomes long-term unemployed, they can hardly ever recover and start work again. This also applies to people who lose their job at an advanced or pre-retirement age: they struggle to get another job.
The textbook solution to overcoming stall is to lower the nose of the plane down towards the ground to regain speed. The solution for coming out of unemployment is similar: stop looking up towards glamorous job opportunities and accept any "down-to-earth" job offer that comes your way.
 |
Plane in deep stall (Source: Wikipedia) |
