Eels and salmon symbolise enterpreneurs and corporate employees who move between the two realms

CorporateNature No 153

By George ELIOT

If RIVERS are a metaphor for the startup world (fresh, fast flowing and ever changing), the OCEAN is analogous to the corporate world (stagnant, vast but occasionally tempestuous).

Most fish species live in either rivers or  the ocean. However, there are two interesting fish families that move between the two: eels and salmon.

A) EELS

Eels are born in the ocean but spend their adult life in rivers. They are a metaphor for a corporate employee who at some point becomes an entrepreneur. 

B) SALMON

Salmon are born in rivers but spend their life in the ocean. They are a metaphor for an entrepreneur who moves into the corporate world. 

Just as both fish species are highly valued and important for the ecosystem, both types of professionals create value for the economy and society. Which of the two is more interesting remains up to you.

Eel (Source: Wikipedia)

3D Environment Is Key for Large Size of Blue Whales and Corporate Giants

3D ocean resembles B2C world in resource availability, allowing structures to reach larger size

George ILIEV

(Giant sting ray and whale shark in the Georgia Aquarium, Atlanta, 2010)

On the one side we have the B2B (business-to-business) and B2C (business-to-consumer) corporate models. On the other we have a bunch of animals that live in 2D habitats (e.g. the savanna) or in a 3D environment (e.g. the ocean). What do these spatial structures of the business and the animal world have in common? It appears that environments with more dimensions are able to produce more resources, which allows their user/eater to grow bigger.

Paradoxically, blue whales grow so big by feeding on the tiniest of creatures: krill. UCLA research published in Nature last May shows that this contradiction can be resolved when taking into account the 3D world in which whales live: in the 3D ocean there is food in any single direction, while in the 2D world of the savanna the food is scattered only in a flat plane, so it is much harder to find. (http://newsroom.ucla.edu/portal/ucla/ucla-life-scientists-view-biodiversity-234522.aspx)

Taking these findings into the business world requires one small step. Could individual consumers be the krill, scattered in a 3D world of multiple levels of income and spending? Could business customers assume the role of the larger animals on the savanna, living in a much flatter world? And if so, could the 3D world inhabited by B2C companies provide the explanation why the Walmarts, the Toyotas and the Apples are the biggest corporations in the world (in revenue or market capitalisation, outside of the oil industry)?

Even the oil giants can roughly fit in this picture as they inhabit a 2.5-dimensional world, which is possibly the best of both worlds: their oil exploration and extraction divisions operate in a fairly flat B2B world, while their downstream refining divisions are immersed in the 3D world of the consumers. I cannot even think of an animal adapted so well to exploit the abundance of nature. Might the oil giants have outpaced evolution or has evolution possibly condemned such rapacious creatures to the geological record?

Giant sting ray, whale shark and beluga whale

The Georgia Aquarium (Atlanta), 2010