Why do they call it the corporate jungle

I have been working for quite some time now. Half of it in extremely structured companies, half of it in extremely unstructured companies. But wherever I had gone, there was always this terminology that was being used. Corporate Jungle. I used to think that I know why this was named like this.

     I thought it was because everyone was a predator and it was eat or get eaten mode. Everybody looks out for themselves, then their team, then their project, then their department, then their company in that order. There are the predators, there are the prey and then there are the prey. Yeah, any office fits this profile but this ain't the reason why it is termed so.

      Then I thought maybe it is not because of what habitats a jungle but rather the jungle itself. A jungle is raw, exposed, rudimentary and evolving. Go on a jungle safari and you will realize the similarities. Just like a jungle, where you eat pretty close by to where you relieve yourself, you have to do the same thing in a corporate setup. You have to fight battles, gain inches, lose feet, still keep a smiling face and get back to the grind to get the best thing done for the company and your career. The old idiom," Don't defecate where you eat" doesn't hold good. Maybe this was the reason why they termed it a corporate jungle. 

       But then after a while, this too became too generic a reason to term such bustling citadels of business as a jungle. There should be something more. That's when I came to the final realization as to why this was termed like this. Imagine a jungle. Something that you had visited in your younger days. Imagine the green lush cover. Imagine the sounds of the birds screeching. Try and recall the smells of the trees mixed with the slush beneath your feet. Remember how the silence and the sudden interruption with an innocuous sound made you jump out of your skin. 

     Now revisit that place.

     The greenery is gone or reduced. The borders of the jungle are shrinking. Civilization has crept in slowly, at first with an innocent shop at the outskirts slowly mushrooming into a settlement. The sounds are gone, replaced by the human noises and the noises that they bring along with them. The jungle is destroyed. The Jungle is non-existent. The same will happen to a corporate. 

If companies don't wake up to the threats that are around them, both internally and externally. Soon they will be engulfed by a powerful agent, slowly but surely. The Jungle will cease to exist. The animals in it, predators, prey and scavengers all will cease to exist.