Rivers erode mountains and fertilise plains; Humans build and apply knowledge

By George ILIEV
CorporateNature Metaphor Series, No 97

Rivers erode mountains upstream and deposit the eroded grains of sand and silt downstream, fertilising the plains. Similarly, people accumulate grains of knowledge when younger and integrate and apply this knowledge when they get older, creating "rivers of knowledge".

What is the ideal amount of knowledge one needs - to go through life and leave a mark? 

Let's start with the minimum amount: this would be a short and slow-running river that starts in the plains and simply doesn't erode anything or deposit anything. 

What would be too much then? Possibly a long river like the Yellow River in China (Huang He) which erodes huge amounts of loess upstream and then floods the plains with alluvial silt - so much so that historically it often formed a viaduct of silt above the level of the plains and when, sooner or later, it would break these natural levees, it would flood the plains and drown hundreds of thousands. This type of river in the human world are some philosophers: people with extraordinary depth, yet unable to communicate with and be understood by the ordinary people around them.

The ideal "river of knowledge" is probably the Nile: a long river that accumulates silt and fertilises the desert. Unlike the dreaded floods of the Yellow River, the flooding of the Nile was welcomed and treasured by the ancient Egyptians - so much so that they built their calendar around this annual event.

The Yellow River at Hukou Falls (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)

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)

Rankings are a bamboo forest; Consulting is a vineyard

By George ILIEV
CorporateNature Metaphor Series, No 94

When you create a ranking for an industry, you are growing a bamboo forest: visible from afar but with shallow roots. Botanically the bamboo is a grass and its roots reach down only a metre under ground. Similarly, rankings do not change the ground underneath: they just increase the visibility of the status quo, like bamboos that create a leafy cover on top of a mountain slope.

On the other hand, when you offer a consultancy service to an industry, you are planting a vineyard, as vine roots reach up to 10 metres deep. What is key in consulting is that it produces recommendations for improvement - the essence of a long and structured process - just as the vines produce grapes based on the richness of the soil.

Bamboo (Source: Wikipedia)

Efficiency leads to displacement: in plant crops and in industries

By George ILIEV
CorporateNature Metaphor Series, No 93

Efficiency leads to displacement. In agriculture, sugar cane is more efficient than sugar beet in capturing the sun's energy and storing it as sugar, so the bulk of sugar produced in the world is now cane sugar. Similarly, the potato is more efficient than turnips in capturing and storing energy as starch, so it has displaced turnips in European agriculture since its introduction from the Americas in the 16th century.

In the industrial world, the Flying Geese Model in East Asian economic development shows industries (production of commoditised goods) being transferred from more advanced to less advanced countries. At some point, the Bangladeshi textile industry or the Chinese chemical industry simply became more efficient than Japan's and Japan found itself unable to compete against them, just like turnips and sugar beet had to give up competing against potatoes and sugar cane.

Flying Geese (Source: Wikipedia)

The Sun and professors send out energy into the universe

By George ILIEV
CorporateNature Metaphor Series, No 92

The Sun loses 135 trillion tonnes of mass every year as it is converted into energy and radiated out into the universe. This is the product of the nuclear fusion equation: four hydrogen atoms are fused together into a helium atom and energy is released in the process.

In a similar way, professors or teachers send their energy into space when lecturing. At the basic physics level, this happens by generating sound waves with their voice. At the metaphorical level, this happens by making light bulbs go on inside student heads.

The Sun doesn't only lose energy and mass: large amounts of dust, comets and asteroids fall on it every year. Similarly, professors also benefit from student feedback during discussions and may get the occasional light bulb go on in their own head.

The Sun (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)

Environment makes chimps and listed companies aggressive, and bonobos and cooperatives peaceful

By George ILIEV
CorporateNature Metaphor Series, No 90

Chimpanzees and bonobos are very similar genetically but very different behaviourally: chimps are aggressive while bonobos are peaceful apes.

In the corporate world, companies and cooperatives are similar legal entities but behave very differently: stock-market listed companies are aggressive in their drive for reporting quarterly profits, while employee-owned cooperatives (e.g. the John Lewis Partnership) are relaxed about profitability and more focused on building a collaborative culture.

The difference seems to be derived from the relationship with the external environment. Bonobos and chimps live on two opposite sides of the Congo River and diverged as two different species about 900,000 years ago. The environment on the left bank of the Congo, where the bonobos live, is less competitive as food is plentifu. On the other hand, the environment on the right bank, where the chimps are, is more stressful - partly because the chimps have historically had to share their habitat with their bigger cousins: the gorillas.

In the corporate world, it appears that "chimp" organisations that are obsessed with external competition also mirror this into internal competitiveness and aggressiveness. While the bonobos of the corporate world build their organisation on the basis of cooperation: like proper left-wing "Rive-Gauche" intellectuals.

Bonobo (Source: Wikipedia)

Pioneers get the arrows, settlers get the land

By George ILIEV
CorporateNature Metaphor Series, No 89

Disrupters in business are the ploughmen of farming: they do the heavy lifting by ploughing up the fields. Ironically, it is often the consolidators after them who sow the seeds and reap a rich harvest.

In the Wild West of America these roles were known as "the pioneers" and "the settlers". One would think that the pioneers, being the first to reach an area, would have had the first pick of the most fertile land. However, the first-mover in many cases (and industries) does not necessarily benefit from the proverbial "first-mover advantage": it is a well-known tenet that "the pioneers get the arrows, while the settlers get the land."

Ploughman (Source: Wikipedia)

Windows of opportunity open and close just like rivers sometimes freeze in winter

By George ILIEV
CorporateNature Metaphor Series, No 88

You cannot walk on water (unless you are Jesus Christ), but you can walk on ice. And not only walk on ice but you can also have a fair on a frozen river or lake. This used to happen in London on the frozen River Thames, where winter fairs were held at least in 24 winters since 1400 AD. The year 1814 AD was the last time the river froze and a River Thames frost fair took place. 

A frozen river creates a temporary opportunity to walk on it or have a fair, but at the same time denies an opportunity to use the river for other purposes, such as shipping. In similar ways, temporary opportunities open and close in life, business and politics. For example, the window of opportunity for Scottish or Catalan independence seems to be closing. In business, the age of the internal combustion engine opened in the early 1900s to the detriment of the electric motor (which had been the leading contender to power vehicles in the late 1800s), but it seems likely that the electric motor will make a comeback and displace internal combustion in the next decade or two.

You never know when the perfect storm, e.g. a volcanic winter, may freeze over the rivers again, even if it hasn't happened for 200 years. And this will invariably be good for some and bad for others: one man's meat is another man's poison.

Frost fair on the Thames in the 1600s (Source: Wikipedia)

Post-industrial and post-colonial Britain is a hollow poplar, not a sturdy oak

By George ILIEV
CorporateNature Metaphor Series, No 87

Britain's global dominance grew like a poplar tree: the rise of Britain was quick and reached high. In the century between the defeat of Napoleon in 1815 and World War 1, Britain was the undisputed global power. The memory lives on. 

Many Brits, however, confuse the metaphor of the poplar with the more popular British symbol: the English oak. An oak can live for over a thousand years; a poplar barely lasts a hundred. What makes things worse for the poplar is that the core of the poplar trunk usually goes hollow as years go by and this eventually brings about its demise (though cuttings may emerge and re-grow into young trees from the stump.) 

Britain owes to industrialisation and colonisation its transformation into a global power in the 19th century. By the 21st century, however, these two phenomena are merely a distant memory for Britain. Brexiteers still think that, because Britain is standing tall in the forest of the world's nations, it must be a formidable player. Yet, once you realise that the core of the poplar is hollow, you have to accept that the UK has a more limited role to play in global politics and trade. 

In this respect, Britain can learn from small countries like Bulgaria and Denmark. Bulgaria saw the zenith of its power in Europe in the 10th century, while the Danish/Norse Vikings conquered Europe in the Middle Ages but have not been heard from since. Both Bulgaria and Denmark were once poplars that have since toppled over and all that is left of them is a clump of cuttings around the stump. Britain's poplar still has a standing trunk but it now firmly belongs to the poplar club, even if being a poplar may not be particularly popular with many Brexiteers.

Poplar tree (Source: Wikipedia)

(Note: this article is based on Brexit Metaphor No 151, with some amendments:
http://brexitmetaphors.blogspot.com/2019/03/poplar-not-oak.html)

Brexit is a rewilding project. In other words: a mammoth task!

By George ILIEV
CorporateNature Metaphor Series, No 86

Brexit is a rewilding project: an attempt to return a habitat to its past natural state in the terms of conservation biology. Over several decades, the EU has evolved as a strong domesticating force on the EU member states. This helped maintain peaceful co-existence and economic cooperation on the continent: you can have domestic animals (dogs, cats and guinea pigs) as pets under a single roof but you cannot have wild animals living closely together (think tigers, lions and rhinos).

However, a key question is how far back in time Brexiteers aim to take Britain in the rewilding project. 

Would they wish to bring back beavers (extinct since the 1500s AD) and wild boar (extinct since 1400 AD), or elk (extinct since the Bronze Age), for example? Or do they plan to bring back the wolverine (extinct since 6000 BC) or even the woolly mammoth (which disappeared around 10,000 BC).

In economic terms, the rewilding project may range from re-introducing state aid (banned under EU competition law in order to create a level-playing field) to scrapping the EU Working Time Directive. It could go further in relaxing health and safety rules to emulate the regulatory regime of the US. Or some could even contemplate extreme scenarios like bringing back child labour (mind you, for the purpose of re-educating recalcitrant youth, some hardliners might argue). 

The latter does look extreme but didn't we all think that mammoths were done and dusted and all that remained of them were their mammoth tusks (just as we thought the "honourable members for the 18th century" belonged to the 18th century). Now, however, de-extinction is starting to become a fashionable and realistic prospect for bringing back animals that have previously gone extinct. Mammoth tasks are not so mammoth any more.

The mammoth is dead. Long live the mammoth!

Woolly mammoths (Source: Wikipedia)

(Note: this article is based on Brexit Metaphor No 112, with some amendments: 

https://brexitmetaphors.blogspot.com/search/label/rewilding)

Stalling planes and unemployed people have a solution: look downwards!

By George ILIEV
CorporateNature Metaphor Series, No 85

The software on modern commercial planes is designed to avoid "stall" at all costs: once a plane stalls, it becomes difficult to control and starts dropping like a brick or spinning towards the ground. The two recent Boeing 737 Max crashes are an unfortunate corollary of having systems so heavily focused on preventing stall. 

In human careers, you can also see this (almost deadly) effect of stall. Once someone becomes long-term unemployed, they can hardly ever recover and start work again. This also applies to people who lose their job at an advanced or pre-retirement age: they struggle to get another job.

The textbook solution to overcoming stall is to lower the nose of the plane down towards the ground to regain speed. The solution for coming out of unemployment is similar: stop looking up towards glamorous job opportunities and accept any "down-to-earth" job offer that comes your way.

Plane in deep stall (Source: Wikipedia)

Trees can be taxed but only as much as they can bear

By George ILIEV
CorporateNature Metaphor Series, No 84

How much can you tax people in a country?  The Laffer Curve shows that increasing taxes beyond a certain per cent is pointless. There is a tax rate at which tax revenue is maximised and raising taxes beyond that creates a disincentive for economic activity and, paradoxically, reduces the tax take.

The owners of rubber tree plantations and maple syrup farms know this and only take as much sap from the tree as it is able to yield without harming the tree or jeopardising its health. Similarly, bee keepers take honey from the bees but leave them with enough to last the winter. Otherwise they risk breaking the camel's back by burdening it with too much straw.

Yet, there are cases when the farmer takes all: chopping down a tree for firewood or slaughtering a pig for meat. This in the world of Government is not taxation at all; it is "nationalisation". 

Latex sap collected from a rubbert tree, Thailand, March 2019

Focus comes from natural selection in animals and from individual choice in humans

By George ILIEV
CorporateNature Metaphor Series, No 83

Nocturnal lemurs seem to have lost their trichromatic colour vision in order to be better able to see fruit at night, shows new research. Colour is not visible at all in the dark but brightness is, so natural selection has weeded out adaptations that are no longer necessary, allowing the lemurs to focus on what is important for their survival.

Successful people also have "focus" as one of their key character traits. However, this does not mean one should only ever focus on one thing and nothing else. T-shaped people are the benchmark: broad skills across disciplines (the horizontal bar) and deep specialist skills in one area (the vertical bar). Yet, the vertical bar does not always start out in the middle (T): it can appear on the left (Г) or on the right. It is down to individual choice where the T bar will start from and what one will focus on. After all, you are what you take time to become.

Lemur (Source: Wikipedia)

Consultants are the perfect gardeners

By George ILIEV
CorporateNature Metaphor Series, No 82

Consultants are gardeners par excellence:

• Some projects they water;
• Others they build trellises for;
• Still others they space out when planting;
• The overgrown ones they prune and trim;
• And occasionally there are the ones they have to uproot.

Gardening (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)

Rice is a super crop; Sales is a super job

By George ILIEV
CorporateNature Metaphor Series, No 80

Sales people are not super human but their job is. The sales role lends itself to continuous returns on investment: the more time you put in sales activities, the more revenue you are likely to generate (even if the returns per additional unit of time may be declining). In this it resembles rice: a super crop that is similarly responsive to investment: the more labour a rice farmer puts in in weeding and watering the crop, the bigger the harvest.

Rice paddy (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)

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)

The formation of the EU unleashed socio-economic competition similar to the evolution of animal species when tectonic plates collide

The linking of North and South America led to the Great American Interchange: successful species advanced and unsuccessful ones retreated. The formation of the EU led to similar movements in the "Great European Shortchange"

By George ILIEV
CorporateNature Metaphor Series, No 77


Until three million years ago, North America (including Mexico and Central America) was separated from South America by an ocean in the middle. Then around three million yeas ago the Isthmus of Panama rose up from the sea floor and created a land bridge linking the two continents: a phenomenon known as the Great American Interchange. 

The New World was never been the same again since: Many northern species, including jaguars, pumas, llamas and a tonne of other animals invaded the South and thrived. But only three South American species moved north and spread out in any large numbers (the armadillo, the opossum and the porcupine). The reason for this discrepancy was that northern animals had had millions of years to evolve and acclimatise to tropical conditions in Mexico and Central America, which had served as a nursery for their southern expansion. On the other hand, southern animals had only lived in the tropics so the northern plains and mountains were not a hospitable habitat for them.

The creation of the EU since the 1950s is a similar story of competition among economic and social species: a Great European Interchange. The Common Market served as a training ground for the global expansion of the most competitive European companies: Airbus, German car-makers, a few pharmaceutical firms and the banks and funds of the City of London. These companies became the jaguars and the pumas of the corporate world. 

On the other hand, freedom of movement for people exposed to trans-continental competition European blue-collar workers who hadn't acclimatised to globalisation. These workers, just like the South American species, became the losers from the Great European Interchange. Their sidelining ultimately led to Brexit and to other anti-EU social movements on the continent, as the EU for them felt more like "a Great European Shortchange." 

In Britain former prime minister Gordon Brown set up a short-lived Migration Impact Fund at the end of his rule in an attempt to mitigate the consequences of globalisation for manufacturing workers. Unfortunately, this fund was closed by the next British prime minister, David Cameron, who took over in 2010. Cameron didn't see the writing on the wall until it was too late - which cost him losing the ill-fated EU referendum in 2016.

There was one key difference between the Great American Interchange and the Great European Shortchange. Three million years ago, the different species in the Americas could only vote with their feet. In present-day Europe, all people can vote in elections and referendums, so leaving behind a large segment of the population feeling shortchanged was never going to be a successful recipe for cohesive political and economic development.

The Great American Interchange (Source: Wikipedia)

@GeorgeILIEV  
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Megalodon was driven to extinction by giant white sharks; Airbus A380 to be phased out in favour of A350

By George ILIEV
CorporateNature Metaphor Series, No 76.

The prehistoric giant shark Megalodon may have been brought to extinction by the rise of its smaller cousin, the great white shark, some 6 to 4 million years ago, a new study claims.

On the same day, European plane maker Airbus announced it would stop production of the Airbus A380 superjumbo in 2021 because of lack of new orders and would focus instead on the smaller A350 and A330 models.

A smaller beast often happens to upend a bigger one in a typical David-and-Goliath fashion. However, extinction does not have to be brought about only by your own cousins: a giant can be outcompeted by species farther removed, like a Boeing 787 Dreamliner.

Fossilised Megalodon tooth and two great white shark teeth (Source: Wikipedia)

 

Airbus A380 (Source: Wikipedia)