A glass exists to hold water. A company exists to serve its customers

By George ILIEV
CorporateNature Metaphor Series, No 104

A glass full of water is a container that makes a valuable liquid useful and accessible. Sometimes people collect glasses for the sake of the glasses themselves, e.g. to put them in a display cabinet of Waterford Crystal. But most of the time glasses, cups and pots exist to serve a higher and more useful purpose.

Metaphorically, companies are glasses and cups while their business activities are the useful liquid they contain inside. 

Before the 2008 Global Financial Crisis, most economists agreed with Milton Friedman's 1970s theory that companies exist for their shareholders. Back then, the key objective of a company was seen as generating shareholder returns, which was akin to believing that a glass exists for its own sake.

However, ever since the 1970s, Peter Drucker, the father of management, has maintained that companies do not exist for their shareholders but for their customers, so the primary objective of a company is to be useful to its customers. This is akin to maintaining that the glass exists to hold a liquid.

The financial crisis has ultimately shown that Milton Friedman was wrong and Peter Drucker was right: the glass exists for the liquid inside, not for the melted and strangely-shaped quartz that makes up the glass itself.

Glass of water (Source: Wikipedia)

Water drinking is like resource consumption: different organisms practice it differently

By George ILIEV
CorporateNature Metaphor Series, No 91

Animals drink water in different ways. Amphibians absorb water through their skin, so they don't ever need to drink. Most terrestrial animals don't need to drink either, as they take in sufficient water through eating succulent food (e.g. leafy plants). Cats and dogs lap up water by using their tongue as a spoon, though there is a difference: dogs seem to be using their tongue more directly as a spoon, while cats whip up the water and then catch it with their mouth.

Humans, in contrast, suck water up or pour it down their  throat, which makes their way of drinking much more efficient and the volume of liquid ingested much larger. In this drinking resembles resource consumption: while most organisms use resources in a diffuse way, humans like to conentrate their resource consumption, resulting in big gulps of water flowing down the throat.

Drinking (Source: Wikipedia)

To make the best use of exec education, eat snow like a camel

Executive Education is an expensive resource. So is snow as a source of water for Asian camels.
By George ILIEV

Snow and camels don't usually go together in our mind. Yet they do in the real world. The two-humped Bactrian camels in western China and Central Asia regularly eat snow in the winter or at high altitudes to satisfy their water needs. This is largely true of all animals living above the snowline, as the only water that exists there is in the form of snow and ice. However, the problem of eating snow is that, once ingested, it takes a lot of food calories to melt and heat up the water to body temperature, as the latent heat of snow and ice is very high. This energy sacrifice requires that camels pace themselves and eat only small amounts of snow at a time.

Education and training have a role in the corporate world analogous to the physiological role of water in an animal's body. Without knowledge and skills, it would be impossible for organisations to function. And while mainstream universities provide "liquid education" below the snowline (i.e. for young employees), after a certain age Executive Education remains the primary source of new knowledge and skills that is available and suited to the needs of a busy professional. 

Executive Education courses are delivered by both the leading business schools and the in-house corporate universities of large multinationals (where they exist). Yet, these courses are a very expensive resource irrespective of the channel in which they are delivered. This is why business units pace themselves and use them sparingly, within the limits of their employee development budgets. Getting your company to sponsor you for an Advanced Management Programme is invariably a very competitive process, as the programme fee can be up to $80,000 for this 50-day course at Harvard.

Whether you are a Bactrian camel or a corporate workhorse, you would probably enjoy equally eating snow and taking courses at Harvard. But that's life above the snowline.