Humans can learn from animals and professional photographers how to apply Strategy

By George ILIEV
CorporateNature Metaphor Series, No 114

We are all decent photographers nowadays, given how easy it is to use a smartphone and take pictures that are well lit and in focus. But then there are the professional photographers. On a professional photograph, only the key object is in focus, while the background is unfocused, even blurred.

The same principle applies to strategy. The real strategist focuses on one thing, to the exclusion of everything else. "Strategy is what you don't do" - says Michael Porter, the creator of the Five Forces model in strategy. The blurred background is where all the elements of "what you don't do" blend in.

Animals are micro-strategists: they prioritise and focus on doing one thing at a time: eating, drinking, hunting or escaping a predator. Perhaps this is because they don't have the mental capacity to do more than one thing. Or perhaps they only live in the present and for the present as they don't understand abstract concepts like the future.

Humans, on the other hand, with our larger mental capacity, can live in the past, present and future at the same time and end up preoccupied with multiple objectives. Picking one thing to do and focusing on doing it well is very difficult. Yet "simplicity is the ultimate sophistication" - says Leonardo da Vinci.

Focus in Photography (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)

We count animals precisely but humans loosely to guarantee human responses

By George ILIEV
CorporateNature Metaphor Series, No 72

When we count the animals in a zoo, we count very precisely and in great detail. For example, the London Zoo counted 19,289 animals in 2018.

When we count humans in a census, we omit a lot of details. For example, the US census conducted every 10 years does not ask for the citizenship of the people who get counted.

The reason for this discrepancy is simply... complexity. Whereas it is us humans who do the counting of the animals, in a census the humans are supposed to count themselves. This may trigger a complex reaction of avoidance in case the incentives for declaring all details are misaligned.

Just like dogs and wolves roll in animal carcasses to mask their scent to be more successful in hunting their prey, so people may try to hide from the census to avoid disclosing information that they find sensitive. Thus, we end up counting humans not with a fine pen but with a broad brush.

Penguins at London Zoo (Source: Wikipedia)