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)

Entrepreneurship is about relentless execution: like grinding a hot poker into a pin

By George ILIEV
CorporateNature Metaphor Series, No 98

"Life isn't about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself" - George Bernard Shaw said. This highlights the imporant distinction between thinking and doing. 

Many people believe the key to success in entrepreneurship is coming up with a great idea: a sesame seed that you find after sifting through tonnes of hay. The sesame seed (or a poppy seed) is also at the centre of PhD dissertations, as doctoral students are discouraged by their supervisors from taking on too big a topic. 

A tiny novel idea may be deemed enough in academia. Yet, the metaphor about the sesame seed is far from sufficient in entrepreneurship. The success of a startup is not that dependent on the sesame seed. A more useful metaphor for running a startup is grinding down a hot poker into a pin. In simple terms, execution trumps ideation.

Startup guru Guy Kawasaki demonstrates the importance of execution for a startup with the following scale:

• An idea is worth 1 point;
• A business plan is worth 10 points;
• A developed product is worth 100 points;
• And the first customer is worth 1,000 points

Relentless execution is the key for hammering the hot poker into a pin. The heat makes the poker tricky to handle but also makes it malleable: strike while the iron is hot. The only thing worse than a hot poker is a cold poker, as grinding a cold poker into a pin would be way more difficult. 

How would you know if your startup is a hot or a cold poker in its base? Hot pokers change their shape after each strike of the hammer - a process known as iteration. Cold pokers don't iterate and as a result they end up as cold pokers, just as they started... whereas many of the hot pokers will eventually turn into pins.

Pin (Source: Wikipedia)

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)

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)

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)

Startup journeys take you across mountains; Corporate careers take you down river valleys

By George ILIEV
CorporateNature Metaphor Series, No 75.

Entrepreneurs discover "points of pain", tackle the uknown and overcome challenges that others often consider insurmountable. This makes the startup journey similar to climbing a mountain.

On the other hand, corporate employees tread a well-trodden path. This makes a corporate career resemble a trek down a river valley. The river has already eroded its bed through the rocks just like the company has established its policies, processes and territory; one only needs to go with the flow and follow the river downstream.

And then, occasionally, there are the canyons: rivers that have cut their bed deep across mountains. These are the unicorns: startups that headed up a mountain and on the way got big and created their own giant river valley.

Grand Canyon (Source: Wikipedia)