Post-industrial and post-colonial Britain is a hollow poplar, not a sturdy oak

By George ILIEV
CorporateNature Metaphor Series, No 87

Britain's global dominance grew like a poplar tree: the rise of Britain was quick and reached high. In the century between the defeat of Napoleon in 1815 and World War 1, Britain was the undisputed global power. The memory lives on. 

Many Brits, however, confuse the metaphor of the poplar with the more popular British symbol: the English oak. An oak can live for over a thousand years; a poplar barely lasts a hundred. What makes things worse for the poplar is that the core of the poplar trunk usually goes hollow as years go by and this eventually brings about its demise (though cuttings may emerge and re-grow into young trees from the stump.) 

Britain owes to industrialisation and colonisation its transformation into a global power in the 19th century. By the 21st century, however, these two phenomena are merely a distant memory for Britain. Brexiteers still think that, because Britain is standing tall in the forest of the world's nations, it must be a formidable player. Yet, once you realise that the core of the poplar is hollow, you have to accept that the UK has a more limited role to play in global politics and trade. 

In this respect, Britain can learn from small countries like Bulgaria and Denmark. Bulgaria saw the zenith of its power in Europe in the 10th century, while the Danish/Norse Vikings conquered Europe in the Middle Ages but have not been heard from since. Both Bulgaria and Denmark were once poplars that have since toppled over and all that is left of them is a clump of cuttings around the stump. Britain's poplar still has a standing trunk but it now firmly belongs to the poplar club, even if being a poplar may not be particularly popular with many Brexiteers.

Poplar tree (Source: Wikipedia)

(Note: this article is based on Brexit Metaphor No 151, with some amendments:
http://brexitmetaphors.blogspot.com/2019/03/poplar-not-oak.html)

Brexit is a rewilding project. In other words: a mammoth task!

By George ILIEV
CorporateNature Metaphor Series, No 86

Brexit is a rewilding project: an attempt to return a habitat to its past natural state in the terms of conservation biology. Over several decades, the EU has evolved as a strong domesticating force on the EU member states. This helped maintain peaceful co-existence and economic cooperation on the continent: you can have domestic animals (dogs, cats and guinea pigs) as pets under a single roof but you cannot have wild animals living closely together (think tigers, lions and rhinos).

However, a key question is how far back in time Brexiteers aim to take Britain in the rewilding project. 

Would they wish to bring back beavers (extinct since the 1500s AD) and wild boar (extinct since 1400 AD), or elk (extinct since the Bronze Age), for example? Or do they plan to bring back the wolverine (extinct since 6000 BC) or even the woolly mammoth (which disappeared around 10,000 BC).

In economic terms, the rewilding project may range from re-introducing state aid (banned under EU competition law in order to create a level-playing field) to scrapping the EU Working Time Directive. It could go further in relaxing health and safety rules to emulate the regulatory regime of the US. Or some could even contemplate extreme scenarios like bringing back child labour (mind you, for the purpose of re-educating recalcitrant youth, some hardliners might argue). 

The latter does look extreme but didn't we all think that mammoths were done and dusted and all that remained of them were their mammoth tusks (just as we thought the "honourable members for the 18th century" belonged to the 18th century). Now, however, de-extinction is starting to become a fashionable and realistic prospect for bringing back animals that have previously gone extinct. Mammoth tasks are not so mammoth any more.

The mammoth is dead. Long live the mammoth!

Woolly mammoths (Source: Wikipedia)

(Note: this article is based on Brexit Metaphor No 112, with some amendments: 

https://brexitmetaphors.blogspot.com/search/label/rewilding)

Stalling planes and unemployed people have a solution: look downwards!

By George ILIEV
CorporateNature Metaphor Series, No 85

The software on modern commercial planes is designed to avoid "stall" at all costs: once a plane stalls, it becomes difficult to control and starts dropping like a brick or spinning towards the ground. The two recent Boeing 737 Max crashes are an unfortunate corollary of having systems so heavily focused on preventing stall. 

In human careers, you can also see this (almost deadly) effect of stall. Once someone becomes long-term unemployed, they can hardly ever recover and start work again. This also applies to people who lose their job at an advanced or pre-retirement age: they struggle to get another job.

The textbook solution to overcoming stall is to lower the nose of the plane down towards the ground to regain speed. The solution for coming out of unemployment is similar: stop looking up towards glamorous job opportunities and accept any "down-to-earth" job offer that comes your way.

Plane in deep stall (Source: Wikipedia)

Trees can be taxed but only as much as they can bear

By George ILIEV
CorporateNature Metaphor Series, No 84

How much can you tax people in a country?  The Laffer Curve shows that increasing taxes beyond a certain per cent is pointless. There is a tax rate at which tax revenue is maximised and raising taxes beyond that creates a disincentive for economic activity and, paradoxically, reduces the tax take.

The owners of rubber tree plantations and maple syrup farms know this and only take as much sap from the tree as it is able to yield without harming the tree or jeopardising its health. Similarly, bee keepers take honey from the bees but leave them with enough to last the winter. Otherwise they risk breaking the camel's back by burdening it with too much straw.

Yet, there are cases when the farmer takes all: chopping down a tree for firewood or slaughtering a pig for meat. This in the world of Government is not taxation at all; it is "nationalisation". 

Latex sap collected from a rubbert tree, Thailand, March 2019

Focus comes from natural selection in animals and from individual choice in humans

By George ILIEV
CorporateNature Metaphor Series, No 83

Nocturnal lemurs seem to have lost their trichromatic colour vision in order to be better able to see fruit at night, shows new research. Colour is not visible at all in the dark but brightness is, so natural selection has weeded out adaptations that are no longer necessary, allowing the lemurs to focus on what is important for their survival.

Successful people also have "focus" as one of their key character traits. However, this does not mean one should only ever focus on one thing and nothing else. T-shaped people are the benchmark: broad skills across disciplines (the horizontal bar) and deep specialist skills in one area (the vertical bar). Yet, the vertical bar does not always start out in the middle (T): it can appear on the left (Г) or on the right. It is down to individual choice where the T bar will start from and what one will focus on. After all, you are what you take time to become.

Lemur (Source: Wikipedia)

Consultants are the perfect gardeners

By George ILIEV
CorporateNature Metaphor Series, No 82

Consultants are gardeners par excellence:

• Some projects they water;
• Others they build trellises for;
• Still others they space out when planting;
• The overgrown ones they prune and trim;
• And occasionally there are the ones they have to uproot.

Gardening (Source: Wikipedia)

Crop rotation and alternating career stages recharge the batteries

By George ILIEV
CorporateNature Metaphor Series, No 81

In the 16th century, farmers in Flanders (Belgium) discovered the four-field crop rotation. This led to an agricultural revolution in continental Europe and in copy-cat Britain. The discovery that planting wheat, turnip, barley and clover on the same plot over four consecutive years would not exhaust the soil led to a big increase in productivity, compared with the previous practice of leaving the land to lie fallow every third year.

Modern lives and careers are starting to look similarly compartmentalised: with the end result of recharging and reinvigorating the person. The four-field crop rotation in one's career can take the form of:
a) work for a company;
b) work for yourself or start up a company;
c) travel;
d) study.

Young people in Western Europe nowadays increasingly take a gap year after high school to travel the world. Mid-career people often do it as well. This corresponds to planting turnips on your field: as the Jewish saying goes "to the worm in a turnip, the whole world is a turnip." After all, it's not a bad idea to come out of your turnip and see what other turnips in the world look like. 

Studying no longer happens only in one's youth. People often do professional degrees after working for some time, e.g. an MBA in one's late 20s / early 30s, or an EMBA in late 30s and 40s. And even beyond that, to keep up with technology advances, many professionals choose to do shorter (e.g. 3-month) IT courses. This is the experience that recharges one's career the most, similar to the effect of clover and other legumes on the soil (enriching it with nitrogen that benefits the crops thereafter).

Entrepreneurship also comes at different stages in life: one may try out an idea in their 20s (what I call Type 1 or  "wolf-type" natural entrepreneurs), then work for a company to gain experience and contacts, and then start up a company again in their 40s or 50s, tapping their accumulated expertise (which I call Type 2 or "dog-type" corporate entrepreneur). In the farming analogy, this stands for planting barley - from which craft beers for the hipsters are made.

Working for a company is the remaining (most mainstream) piece of the sequence. Good old wheat is the bread (and butter) of the global economy after all.

Apart from the four-field rotation, there is another very productive agricultural technique which was developed by the Native Americans before the rise of modernity: planting maize (corn), beans and squash simultaneously, known as the Three Sisters. However, this simultaneous recharging of the soil by growing three different crops has a much rarer analogy in the human world. It can only be pulled off by the Rennaissance Man / Woman. It takes an entrepreneurial polymath to manage to juggle with study, travel, working for a company and launching a startup at the same time. 

Crop rotation (Source: Wikipedia)

Rice is a super crop; Sales is a super job

By George ILIEV
CorporateNature Metaphor Series, No 80

Sales people are not super human but their job is. The sales role lends itself to continuous returns on investment: the more time you put in sales activities, the more revenue you are likely to generate (even if the returns per additional unit of time may be declining). In this it resembles rice: a super crop that is similarly responsive to investment: the more labour a rice farmer puts in in weeding and watering the crop, the bigger the harvest.

Rice paddy (Source: Wikipedia)

Iterating startups are like falling cats: trying to land on their feet

By George ILIEV
CorporateNature Metaphor Series, No 79

Startups need to iterate in order to survive. In this they very much resemble falling cats. All successful startups have at some point been a falling cat that needed to orient itself downwards to land on its feet and survive. 

Entrepreneurs are often described as people who jump off a cliff and build wings on the way down. A falling cat might be an even better analogy: the cat has a solid "cat righting reflex" inside it from several weeks old. A height as little as 30 cm would give a cat enough runway to manage to turn itself and land on its paws. Startups often need a bit more runway but they also need multiple / sequential iterations.

An African proverb says: "If stretching were wealth, the cat would be rich." Cats are remarkably stretchable and flexible, which sets a good example for entrepreneurs: keep flexing.

Yawning cat (Source: Wikipedia)

Patents and campfires provide limited protection from predators

By George ILIEV
CorporateNature Metaphor Series, No 78

Registering a patent is like lighting a campfire in the wild. Campfires repel animals most of the time but attract wolves, bears and snakes sometimes. Similarly, a patent may protect your intellectual property most of the time, but in some cases it may simply alert the competition to the fact that there is something going on in the area and they should come over to sniff around.

Fire normally scares animals away from the immediate perimeter (several metres away) but beyond that everything is up for grabs. In a similar way, patents provide protection for that very discovery/invention but can often be circumvented a bit further afield. 

So don't be surprised if those picnic bags left lying around the campfire go missing by the morning.

Campfire (Source: Wikipedia)

The formation of the EU unleashed socio-economic competition similar to the evolution of animal species when tectonic plates collide

The linking of North and South America led to the Great American Interchange: successful species advanced and unsuccessful ones retreated. The formation of the EU led to similar movements in the "Great European Shortchange"

By George ILIEV
CorporateNature Metaphor Series, No 77


Until three million years ago, North America (including Mexico and Central America) was separated from South America by an ocean in the middle. Then around three million yeas ago the Isthmus of Panama rose up from the sea floor and created a land bridge linking the two continents: a phenomenon known as the Great American Interchange. 

The New World was never been the same again since: Many northern species, including jaguars, pumas, llamas and a tonne of other animals invaded the South and thrived. But only three South American species moved north and spread out in any large numbers (the armadillo, the opossum and the porcupine). The reason for this discrepancy was that northern animals had had millions of years to evolve and acclimatise to tropical conditions in Mexico and Central America, which had served as a nursery for their southern expansion. On the other hand, southern animals had only lived in the tropics so the northern plains and mountains were not a hospitable habitat for them.

The creation of the EU since the 1950s is a similar story of competition among economic and social species: a Great European Interchange. The Common Market served as a training ground for the global expansion of the most competitive European companies: Airbus, German car-makers, a few pharmaceutical firms and the banks and funds of the City of London. These companies became the jaguars and the pumas of the corporate world. 

On the other hand, freedom of movement for people exposed to trans-continental competition European blue-collar workers who hadn't acclimatised to globalisation. These workers, just like the South American species, became the losers from the Great European Interchange. Their sidelining ultimately led to Brexit and to other anti-EU social movements on the continent, as the EU for them felt more like "a Great European Shortchange." 

In Britain former prime minister Gordon Brown set up a short-lived Migration Impact Fund at the end of his rule in an attempt to mitigate the consequences of globalisation for manufacturing workers. Unfortunately, this fund was closed by the next British prime minister, David Cameron, who took over in 2010. Cameron didn't see the writing on the wall until it was too late - which cost him losing the ill-fated EU referendum in 2016.

There was one key difference between the Great American Interchange and the Great European Shortchange. Three million years ago, the different species in the Americas could only vote with their feet. In present-day Europe, all people can vote in elections and referendums, so leaving behind a large segment of the population feeling shortchanged was never going to be a successful recipe for cohesive political and economic development.

The Great American Interchange (Source: Wikipedia)

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