We’ve been taught to see business through an economic lens. We’ve been trained to build businesses using engineering principles.
Both disciplines can be useful. I've learned much from both. But they miss something important; something that holds the clue to finding and building better businesses.
That’s because business is fundamentally biological. Business is carried out by living, human beings. Businesses exist to serve human beings. Human beings are biological.
Once we get that firmly fixed in our mind, we will beget and nurture businesses differently.
How do we learn to do that? How do we see the world biologically? Well, it would probably help to read books like Lewis Thomas’s Lives of a Cell. Or, Erwin Chargaff’s Heraclitean Fire. Or, E.O. Wilson’s, The Ants.
But you’d learn even more if you would put this ancient proverb into action: Go to the ant, thou sluggard; consider its ways and be wise!
Go and See! That’s almost always the right first step.
Both disciplines can be useful. I've learned much from both. But they miss something important; something that holds the clue to finding and building better businesses.
That’s because business is fundamentally biological. Business is carried out by living, human beings. Businesses exist to serve human beings. Human beings are biological.
Once we get that firmly fixed in our mind, we will beget and nurture businesses differently.
How do we learn to do that? How do we see the world biologically? Well, it would probably help to read books like Lewis Thomas’s Lives of a Cell. Or, Erwin Chargaff’s Heraclitean Fire. Or, E.O. Wilson’s, The Ants.
But you’d learn even more if you would put this ancient proverb into action: Go to the ant, thou sluggard; consider its ways and be wise!
Go and See! That’s almost always the right first step.