How green was my company?

Management books tend towards the macho. Business, to a certain mindset, is conflict by other means the man sitting next to me on the tube the other day was reading Clausewitz's 'On War', and, with his pinstripes and BlackBerry, didn't look like he was heading for a battlefield. But there's an inevitable attraction in stressing the 'extreme risk' of the office-bound life, and the metaphors of management literature tend to reflect this. "Firefighting", in particular, seems to have entered mainstream language: managers talk about "putting out fires", which they safely do while pacing a carpet, taking conference calls, and earning many times the salary of those who walk into burning buildings for a living.