All I Need to Know about Business I Learned from a Duck

Mother Nature-A model for business success?

I’m one of those guys who has had a lot of luck. When I started my ad agency I was lucky to pick up my first big client within 60 days of putting out my shingle (that client stuck with us until I sold the agency over 22 years later!). And when the agency started having good luck in winning regional and national creative awards, our growth became exponential. So it didn’t surprise me when early on in my search for a new paradigm that would improve the way we manage and run our businesses, I stumbled upon the following quote from Albert Einstein: “Look to nature and you will understand everything better.”

Eureka! By providing business leaders with simple vignettes from the natural world and linking them to situations in the business world, maybe they will begin to not only see themselves and the businesses they run in new and different ways, but they might begin to think, plan and act differently as well. But if the primordial character of nature is “survival of the fittest” as Charles Darwin hypothesized, how could a book that utilizes metaphors and lessons from the natural world lead us out of this management, leadership and financial mess? Didn’t intense competition and survival of the fittest get us to where we are today?

Mother Nature – Survival of the fittest?

While Darwin is the most famous evolutionist, the true pioneer and founder of the theory of evolution was the French biologist Jean-Baptiste de Lamarck. His theory, which was presented 50 years before Darwin, was based on an “instructive”, cooperative interaction among organisms and their environment that enables living organisms to survive and evolve. It is a much more compassionate theory of survival that substitutes struggle and aggression with harmony and cooperation where the strong help the weak and in so doing all become stronger. A rapidly growing field called “Systems Biology” recognizes the critical role cooperation plays in sustaining life on earth. So I ask you to ponder the following question – Why wouldn’t the “systems” principles that have created abundance in nature (biology) also apply to sustaining and growing business organizations? If that makes even a little bit of sense to you, I think you’re going to enjoy this book.