Animals can be more or less employed - just like humans

By George ILIEV
CorporateNature Metaphor Series, No 96

Muhammad Yunus, the founder of microfinance and Nobel Peace Prize winner, once asked a question during a talk: "Have you seen an unemployed animal?" His point was everybody deserves a livelihood and it is simply human nature to find employment by being entrepreneurial. 

Yet, employment in animals comes in different shades and sizes. Herbivores that depend on grazing low-calorie cellulose-heavy plants such as grass (antelopes) or bamboo (pandas) spend most of their day eating or ruminating. While predators spend only a small percentage of their time eating, as they eat high-calorie meat; yet they dedicate the majority of their time recovering from unsuccessful hunting sallies.

The animal spectrum resembles the hunter-gatherer societies of early humans: the gatherers were the herbivores, looking for lower-calorie plants; while the hunters were the predators attempting the occasional high-calorie kill.

Similarly, the risk profile of entrepreneurs determines to a degree the characteristics of their startups: more risk-averse entrepreneurs focus on businesses that can generate stable (even if small) cash flows, while the less risk-averse ones may work on an idea for years without pay (sometimes even a decade) in order to build up a business and sell it.

So, unemployed animals don't exist, but variably-employed animals do!

San tribesman from Namibia (Source: Wikipedia)

Public universities are elephants; Private universities are lions

By George ILIEV
CorporateNature Metaphor Series, No 95

Big public universities are large herbivores: elephants, rhinos and hippos. They are slow(ish) but powerful and as a result are safe and well-established in their local environment.

For-profit universities are predators: lions, tigers and leopards. They punch above their weight (pound for pound) as their aggressive nature makes them more visible, with their much bigger marketing spend. They cannot kill the largest herbivores but they feast on medium-sized and smaller ones: zebras, antelopes and gazelles (i.e. outcompeting local universities and community colleges).

If elephants were more aggressive, they would be a formidable force in the savannah. But they rarely are, which leaves significant space for predators to mark as their territory. This goes along with the saying: "Public universities don't sell well what they do. Private universities often sell well what they don't do."

African elephant (Source: Wikipedia)