"The affections are like lightning: you cannot tell where they will strike till they have fallen"
About this Quote
Love, loyalty, obsession, sudden belief in a person or an idea: Iacocca frames them as voltage, not virtue. “The affections are like lightning” makes attachment feel less like a carefully chosen investment and more like a weather event - unpredictable, uncontrollable, and vaguely dangerous. Coming from a businessman famous for rescuing Chrysler with bravado, salesmanship, and a near-mythic faith in momentum, the line reads as a confession: even the architects of “strategy” are, at key moments, run by impulse.
The intent is disarming. In a culture that prizes rational decision-making (especially in boardrooms), Iacocca smuggles in the truth that human preference doesn’t arrive via spreadsheet. You don’t preselect what you’ll care about; you discover it after impact. That “till they have fallen” matters: the strike is already over by the time you can name it. Affection becomes retrospective storytelling - we explain our attachments after they’ve rearranged our priorities.
The subtext also fits the corporate world he inhabited, where charisma and gut instinct often masquerade as analysis. Hiring, mentoring, brand devotion, even “belief” in a turnaround plan can hit like lightning: sudden, electrifying, and hard to justify in committee. It’s a reminder that organizations are built on supposedly “soft” forces - admiration, resentment, identification - that behave like storms, not levers.
In Iacocca’s era of big personalities and televised business heroism, the line doubles as a warning: if affection is a strike from the sky, you’d better know how to ground it before it burns the place down.
The intent is disarming. In a culture that prizes rational decision-making (especially in boardrooms), Iacocca smuggles in the truth that human preference doesn’t arrive via spreadsheet. You don’t preselect what you’ll care about; you discover it after impact. That “till they have fallen” matters: the strike is already over by the time you can name it. Affection becomes retrospective storytelling - we explain our attachments after they’ve rearranged our priorities.
The subtext also fits the corporate world he inhabited, where charisma and gut instinct often masquerade as analysis. Hiring, mentoring, brand devotion, even “belief” in a turnaround plan can hit like lightning: sudden, electrifying, and hard to justify in committee. It’s a reminder that organizations are built on supposedly “soft” forces - admiration, resentment, identification - that behave like storms, not levers.
In Iacocca’s era of big personalities and televised business heroism, the line doubles as a warning: if affection is a strike from the sky, you’d better know how to ground it before it burns the place down.
Quote Details
| Topic | Love |
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