Do you work in a Wolf or Dog culture?

If you answered the question you probably gave the wrong answer. Startup culture is wolf culture, while dogs revel in “corporate-style” hierarchy.

(By George ILIEV)

The phrase "dog-eat-dog" was coined for a reason. Counterintuitively, dogs do not cooperate among themselves. Wolves do. Dogs dominate or obey each other in a strict hierarchy of submission, whereas wolves are the ones who “discuss” to make group decisions. If you work for a startup, you are likely working in a “wolf culture”, grounded in cooperation and tolerance. If you work at a big corporation, your environment is probably a “dog culture”, based on domination and pecking order.

Photo: Pack of Wolves (Source: Wikimedia)

EXPERIMENT 1: Top dog dominates in "dog-eat-dog" hierarchy

Recent experiments in Austria show that a top dog will monopolise all food and will not let a lower-ranking dog eat from its bowl. A lower-ranking dog would be so intimidated it would not even dare attempt to eat with the top dog. In contrast, the same experiment with wolves shows that both high-ranking and low-ranking pack members share access to the food. There is a simple explanation why dogs have diverged so far from the cooperative nature of wolves. Dogs were bred for their obedience to man, who is seen by the dog as the “top dog”. Humans mistakenly perceive this as cooperation but from the dog’s perspective this is submission, not cooperation. A dog’s true (beige-to-grey) colours shine through when left in a group of its own.

EXPERIMENT 2: Dogs are poor at independent problem-solving

The domestication of the dog, over around 10,000 years of selective breeding, has reinforced the dog’s hierarchical perception of the world and the micro-society of the pack. This appears to impact the dog’s problem-solving skills. Experiments with dogs and wolves show that 80% of wolves manage to open a can of sausages, while no adult dogs manage to achieve this under the same conditions. The exception are dog puppies, who manage to open the can with a similar success rate as the wolves. This shows that the lack of independence in dogs is increased by their cohabitation with humans as puppies grow up.

THREE LESSONS FOR THE BUSINESS WORLD

Lesson 1: Companies are no democracies

The results of the group-feeding experiment bring to mind a well-known fact: No matter how much we praise democracy as the most sophisticated system for ruling a country , corporations are not democracies. Corporations are authoritarian organisations with an established hierarchy, just like an army, a police unit and a pack of dogs.

Lesson 2: Do not confuse submission with cooperation

Corporate executives can learn from the psychology of the dog. Your corporate subordinates might be very cooperative in their interaction with you (their boss), but that does not mean they see themselves as cooperating. Instead, they may be perceiving themselves as Yes-men who have to act submissively. This model may work for subordinates without strong independent thinking but if you want to keep the real problem-solvers working for you, you have to empower them and treat them like wolves treat each other, with a degree of equality. Otherwise your subordinates may leave for a less hierarchical organisation or for a startup.

Lesson 3: Corporations institutionalise their employees

Corporate culture institutionalises its employees just like the human “top-dog” reduces the problem-solving skills of his/her pet as the puppy grows up. Conversely, startup culture encourages problem solving and independent thinking in ways similar to what the wolf experiments show.

Hope at the end of the dog kennel

Let’s not give a dog a (completely) bad name. Corporations come in all shapes and sizes and corporate cultures vary hugely. In a similar way, there is variation among dog breeds: Labrador retrievers and poodles are more hierarchical and aggressive towards lower-ranking pack members than German shepherds are. It may be no coincidence that German shepherds physically resemble wolves much more closely.

In the corporate world, Google and Facebook have a “less-hiearchical” hierarchy than oil and mining giants like ExxonMobil and BHP Billiton. In the end, both Google and Facebook were born as startups 10-15 years ago. Would another 10,000 years of selective breeding change that?

I look forward to your thoughts in the comments below or @GeorgeILIEV

Entrepreneurship, Consulting and the MBA: The Three Stem Cells of the Business World

Three ways to maintain versatility in the age of uncertainty

By George ILIEV

An undergraduate student at the business school I graduated from recently approached me for career advice. "Is there a way you can keep your options open throughout your career?", she asked. The article below summarizes my advice to her:

Many things in life are path-dependent:
- Your second job depends on your first job;
- your first job depends on your internship;
- your internship depends on your university degree;
- your university depends on your high school,
- and so on all the way to kindergarten and even before that, possibly to the kindergarten of your parents and grandparents.

There are opportunities to get out of the rut and change direction from one stage to the next but the probability of this happening naturally is very low. Even a smaller cross-industry lateral move (say from retail manager to supply chain manager) requires a lot of effort in rowing against the current... and a dose of luck.

The Three Stem Cells of the Business World

There are three tracks in business that are immune to path-dependency and can lead naturally to a variety of different industries and functions. I call these “the three stem cells of the business world”, as they contain a high degree of versatility and can be moulded into almost anything, just like the stem cells of an embryo multiply and grow into different tissues and organs:

1. Entrepreneurship is the most functionally-versatile profession as an entrepreneur (on the business side) will perform a variety of functions. These include marketing, business planning, business development, PR (blogging), finance (raising capital), accounting, legal and at least half-a-dozen other functions before the startup grows big enough for these roles to be filled by specialists.

2. Consulting, unlike entrepreneurship, is not functionally versatile but is instead extremely industry-versatile. Management and operations consultants often clock up projects in a dozen different industries, which is the essence of consulting and the main source of value creation: the cross-pollination effect.

3. The MBA gives a graduate both functional and industry versatility, as it combines condensed educational and professional experiences in a number of fields. However, the MBA is a “stem cell” with an expiry date: after your first post-MBA job, you can no longer rely on its versatility and will invariably start specialising in your new pathway (unless you go into post-MBA entrepreneurship or consulting).

These three stem cells of the business world are crucial in our age of uncertainty. The sheer number of unemployed finance professionals after the 2008 crisis shows how path-dependent business can be. And though the trio is not entirely ploripotent, (i.e. the three cannot lead to absolutely any outcome), they are the closest we get to a business world version of the stem cell.

Energy, mass and the speed of light

If you remain unconvinced by the biology metaphor above, here is a memorably superficial analogy from physics. Einstein's fundamental equation E=MC2 (energy equals mass times the speed of light squared) has the same three elements: E(ntrepreneurship), M(BA) and C(consulting). Now, who would argue with Einstein?

(Photo credit: Stem cell, Wikipedia)

Does changing jobs make you an orangutan?

Changing jobs and moving through the jungle canopy share the same activity pattern

George ILIEV

The best avatar for someone changing jobs is the orangutan. Imagine an orangutan suspended from a tree, grasping the branches with its long arms, swinging effortlessly from tree to tree. Now imagine this orangutan is you, the branches are the different corporate departments and the trees are the different companies you will swing between in your career. If only changing jobs was always as smooth as the swinging of the organgutan.

Photo: Orangutan (Source: Wikipedia)

The corporate world and the jungle

In the corporate world you swing, rather than hop, between companies: businesses are not a flat surface for hopscotch but a hierarchical jungle canopy, with many levels up and down. Trees lumped together are companies in the same industry, so it is fairly easy for your esteemed orangutan to swing between companies while staying in the same industry. Trees far apart are companies in different industries and it takes a bigger effort to traverse a larger distance.

Losing your job and falling to the ground

The main rule in the orangutan's jungle is not to fall to the ground. In corporate speak this means not to lose your job, or else you risk entering a downward spiral.

Recruiters often cite a well-known paradox: "the most important factor for getting a job is having a job in the first place." Even without access to recruiter advice, the orangutan does exactly that: it rarely lets go of its branch before it has grasped the next one.

Once in a while the orangutan may be forced to "fly" between trees in a long jump, the equivalent of leaving a company before you have another job offer in your hand. However, in such a forced jump, the orangutan is likely to land lower than its starting position and may occasionally drop to the jungle floor.

If you've had enough of the orangutan analogy, think of the swift, one of the fastest birds in the world. The remarkable thing about the swift is it never lands on the ground. If it did, its short wings would not be able to generate the lift needed to take off again. You need to be perched somewhere high to be able to fly out to somewhere higher.

The MBA: a shortcut through the jungle

The MBA degree is one of the few shortcuts in life. It is a walkway above the jungle canopy that allows you to move to a different patch of trees (a new industry or new location), which would otherwise be either impossible, or would take a whole series of consecutive moves.

If you are ever in doubt about your career, take your cues from the orangutan: 

1) Move between trees and branches in a planned succession; and

2) If you ever lose your job, get another one as soon as you can.