The Low-Hanging Fruit of Corporate Metaphors
In recent days, I’ve encountered online commentary about the phrase “low-hanging fruit” multiple times. I don’t mean the phrase being used — I mean people writing about the phrase itself. It’s like the phrase has become the low-hanging fruit of online discourse. Irony can be so delicious, like finding a donut at a police station.
First of all, and I can’t overemphasize this enough, “low-hanging” should be hyphenated. That’s just a given. If you’re not hyphenating “low-hanging,” you’re probably the type of person who says “irregardless.” And if you’re that person, I assume you also think “a lot” is one word, and “literally” means “figuratively.” Let’s be honest, you’re a linguistic war criminal.
Historical Context
The phrase goes back centuries as a reference to fruit, like pears or apples, that hang on the lower branches, making them easier to pick. The metaphor is obvious — it’s like the fruit is just begging to be picked, much like how your wallet is begging to be stolen when you leave it on the table at a crowded bar. Or how a poorly coded website is just begging to be hacked by a teenager with too much time and not enough friends.
Rise in Popularity
The phrase wasn’t very popular until the early 90s. Here’s a Google Ngram view.
Note that my chart may look different from the charts you will find elsewhere. By default, Google “smoothes” the data, and everyone else who wrote about this went with the default version. I’m a data scientist, and if I want to smooth the data, then I’ll do it myself, thank you very much. I’m not going to let Google tell me how to live my life. I already sold my soul to their algorithm; they don’t get to boss me around, too.
Now I understand why the economy in the 90s was roaring. I had thought it had something to do with the explosion of the Web, economic policy, or an end-of-the-Cold-War dividend. I never realized that until the 90s, businesses weren’t focusing their efforts on low-hanging fruit. The discovery of this long-existing but little-used metaphor revolutionized modern business! It’s like businesses were wandering around an orchard, starving, until someone pointed out the apples right in front of their faces. Meanwhile, Enron was plucking the poisonous berries and selling them as health supplements.
But seriously, I’ll go one step further than other commentators and narrow this down more than just “the phrase picked up popularity in the late 80s and/or early 90s.” Specifically, the catalyst behind the adoption of the “low-hanging fruit” metaphor was the 1992 publication of The Challenge of Organizational Change by Rosabeth Moss Kanter, a professor at Harvard Business School and (in 1992) the editor of the Harvard Business Review.
The Modern Impact
Kanter mentioned the phrase in this sentence: “By using early Work-Outs to go after irksome minor issues like excess paperwork–’low-hanging fruit’ in company parlance–GE gets quick victories on the board.”
The phrase had been adopted at GE just as CEO Jack Welch was mid-apotheosis, as part of a process improvement initiative (“Work-Outs”) that focused on 3–4 month turnarounds for results. These were considered hugely successful and became quite popular, though now we know that Jack Welch wasn’t all that and a bag of chips, as his acolytes have gone on to destroy every company they touch. That’s why I only fly on Airbus planes now. In Welch’s wake, GE’s stock price was the real low-hanging fruit, or a lead balloon in a helium parade.
Anyway, GE was using the phrase, and then an HBS professor mentioned it in an influential book, and the rest is history. I think the phrase is here to stay because it is so vivid and easy to use… it’s the low-hanging fruit of corporate metaphors. And let’s face it, if there’s one thing corporations love, it’s a good buzzphrase. It’s like catnip for CEOs.
Michael Bagalman is a data scientist, but sometimes decides to write on other topics for which he has no credentials aside from his own unchecked ego.
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