This was an interesting title I spotted in the Economist the other day!
Instantly, I thought it was a relevant metaphor for some of our own work-related issues, so I posted a message on our internal work channel asking what it could be an metaphor for.
One of the designers responded that it sounds like a metaphor for ‘design creep’ – when extra features keep creeping into a product, bloating it till we overwhelm the customer and make a job that they want to do, difficult with extra features that we put in their way.
Someone from product management felt that it was a metaphor for focussing on doing the right things. A reference to less features or products but honing and increasing the impact on the customer.
I, personally, thought – looking at this from a scrum / agile perspective – felt that this was a good metaphor for restricting the work in progress. By doing less work, we can often speed up by ensuring that work does get complete and we don’t overwhelm ourselves.
The fish in our metaphor can be either products, features, people, effort or creativity. The concept of exploiting something and not allowing it to replenish (at its own natural pace) applies to many aspects of our life.