Growth lessons from Nature

The Oak Tree

The oak tree grows by accretion – every year, it adds a ring to its trunk and becomes thicker and thicker, until it becomes a giant. This is actually the most common way a company grows – become bigger but essentially along the same lines, always. We add markets, add products, the way an oak tree adds rings, over time, without changing any thing in the basic architecture of the organism.

What are the special issues of managing such a growth pattern? What makes an oak tree strong?

• A strong trunk: i.e., a strong sense of ‘core’, great clarity on what is our business and what isn’t
• An equally strong sense of values
• And operating processes

As more and more businesses are added, the older businesses should not require attention. Their environment should be stable and unshakable.

The Banyan Tree

The Banyan’s pattern of growth is totally different from that of the mighty oak. It creates replicas of itself, increasing its span, until, in the end, you cannot even tell the daughter from the mother tree. Each tree is self-sustaining, yet bound to its mother and its siblings, and ever ready to spread out again.

To follow this model, a company would keep creating self sustaining businesses over time, and yet retain a strong sense of connectedness. Perhaps a company like Matsushita would answer to this description, with its penchant for spinning off new divisions, each held together only by finance, and a shared value system.

How does one manage such a growth?

• Creation of an infinite pool of entrepreneurs, each of whom
can run a business independently
• Who are yet held together by shared values
• A commitment to support each spin-off with nourishment
from the center until it stabilizes

When would such a model make sense? Clearly, where the environment creates new opportunities, each of whom are unrelated to each other, yet need to be part of a common ‘umbrella’ brand. Perhaps GE is another example of such a model.

The Beehive

More accurately, the Swarm of Bees. The beehive is created by hundreds of independent workers – no one of them has the knowledge and capability or even intelligence to build a hive, yet, together, they do it effortlessly. Where, in business, do we see this model in action? Perhaps the now-famous dabba wallas of Mumbai. Some religious organizations have this capability, perhaps Al Qaeda does, for all I know!

In a company, the closest I have seen to this model, is Polaris Software’s Lakshya process – a visioning exercise involving every last employee in the firm (all several thousand of them!), which tries to tap the collective consciousness of all of them. The result is not a business plan or even a written document, it is simply a collective consciousness.

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