Emmie spots a peanut on the floor. Dishi, sitting opposite, spots that Emmie has spotted it. In a flash they are racing for it: Emmie strutting; Dishi on all fours. Amid the ensuing screeching, hooting and wrestling, Emmie triumphs and scoffs the prize, leaving Dishi to console himself with a thunderous burst of flatulence.

No, it’s not another Friday night at Wetherspoon’s in Walsall. It’s Tuesday morning in the gorilla enclosure at the Port Lympne Wild Animal Park in Kent. And I’m not watching the primates as a summer holiday treat. I’m here at the invitation of the training company 23Twelve, which has launched a new course designed to teach people about business via interaction with wild animals. But before we get on to the question of what gorillas can teach us about work, a little context about analogies.

According to people who study these kind of things, making parallels between different spheres of life is a fundamental human tendency. Apparently, children struggle with it before the age of about five but then do it more and more. For adults, analogising is a particularly handy way of conveying concepts that are either very boring (eg, bookkeeping) or very complicated (eg, the human genome) and because business is often both very boring and complicated, it is fertile territory for them.

Indeed, sometimes it seems as if business is discussed entirely in terms of comparisons. There are innumerable books about business as golf, as warfare, as Shakespeare and as gardening. Management Today magazine even runs a regular column entitled “Why business is like . . .”, which in recent months has drawn on everything from Hitchcock movies to hostage negotiation for business analogies.

However, even in this context, 23Twelve’s link between commerce and wild animals seemed peculiar. So much so that I couldn’t resist taking up its offer to sample the £1,200 ahead course. And over two hours of marauding across the safari park, I was informed by the founders of the training company that animals, and gorillas in particular, can teach us about business because: (1) the animal kingdom operates by unwritten rules, just as companies do, and hanging out with animals can help us to understand how; (2) animals often hunt and live in groups, and watching them work together can teach us about teamwork; and (3) animals communicate nonverbally and interacting with them can highlight the importance of body language in business.

As entertaining as it was getting up close to Emmie and Dishi, I struggled with 23Twelve’s logic. First, it is obvious that the unwritten rules of gorilla behaviour (eg, when a male gorilla takes control of a family group he may kill all infants of the preceding silverback) are not in any way analogous to the unwritten rules of the workplace (eg, never use someone else’s mug for your tea). Secondly, although gorillas and other animals may work in teams (eg, occasionally a female will groom a silverback), they do not really stick together in the way business teams do (stroke your boss and you’ll be out of a job before you can say “sexual harassment”). And as for the stuff about body language - it is barely believable that it is necessary to write this sentence in a national newspaper - gorillas and other wild animals do not behave like human beings. When we have conflicts at work, we do not fight to the death, using our canines to cause deep, gaping injuries in our foes. We call HR.

Though returning from Kent, I wondered whether it would be fair to single out 23Twelve for woolly thinking. People have done moronic things in the name of business development for decades: you can do teambuilding courses in everything from cocktail making to chicken herding. And even the longest-established business analogies work only to an extent. Take sport, for example. There are thousands of executives out there who are forever making football, golfing and cricketing analogies with their work. But the fact is that business is not as driven by conflict as is sport, and is rarely as emotive or inspirational. People in business are not as passionate or committed as sportsmen. Companies don’t need to be as competitive as sports teams - some companies don’t have any competition. And while sports teams will prepare intensely before hitting the field, in business we are out there all the time.

However, on reflection, there are degrees of inanity and 23Twelve has crossed the line. Trying to learn about business by observing gorillas is, to employ an analogy, like trying to learn to fly by listening to Enrique Iglesias records. And it is one thing to do something idiotic in the name of building team spirit, but quite another to be told that there are direct business benefits in the activity.

Worryingly, 23Twelve are not the only ones insulting our intelligence in this way. I have just come across a press release from an American dolphin-training company extending into the business training market. “[We] leverage the excitement of dolphins,” it declares, “to help companies improve productivity, retention, communication and their bottom line.”

Clearly, something needs to be done to stem this tide of stupidity before we all end up having to play with baboons in the name of development. I think business can find inspiration in the world of literature, which sporadically has tackled the problem of bad analogies in writing, eg, “her hair glistened in the rain like nose hair after a sneeze”, by publishing the worst examples online. Times Online is launching a management blog and I’ll happily post any preposterous business analogies you stumble across, if you e-mail them to me with the reason you think they don’t work. It will be like an online version of the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381. Sort of. sathnam@thetimes.co.uk

Times Recommends

• B&B shareholders forced into funding rescue
• John Lewis department store sales plunge 8.3%
• Families turn to credit to cover mortgage bills