The table below highlights a few of the major structural similarities between evolution and business:

• A business lives and grows within a broad business ecosystem, just like species lives within a larger physical ecosystem.

• The business generates a constant stream of services, much like a species generates a constant stream of organisms.

• Each of these services (or organisms) lives and dies within a smaller ecosystem.

• A successful business generates a large number of services simultaneously and over time, just like a species some live while others die.

• Within the business, a successful service can spawn a number of similar services, each with some small variation from the “mother” service. Most of the services in this next generation do not thrive in the marketplace, just as most organisms do not do not thrive in the physical ecosystem. The few services that do thrive typically then spawn another generation of new services.

Notice that, in this description, the services appear to have a life of their own—surviving in the marketplace, thriving, and spawning new generations of services. Of course we know that the services do not do anything themselves. They are simply vehicles for the creativity and effort of the people (employees) in and around the business who do all the work.

But is this really different from the process of life? The organisms themselves do not do the actual evolutionary work of replication, variation, and selection. Within each organism the DNA and thousands of proteins actually do the work of replication. Similarly, the organism itself does not generate variations. Here again the DNA and its team of proteins (employees?) execute a process of DNA mixing during the replication phase.

Finally, we may think that the organism at least controls its selection as a parent of the next generation. But we can just as easily describe the external ecosystem as the agent, impartially selecting certain organisms based on fitness criteria totally unknown to the organism.

• When the ecosystem delivers a drought, the individual organisms themselves do not choose their personal tolerance to the drought.
  
• When a lion hunts a gazelle, the unfortunate gazelle does not choose to be weaker, slower, older, or less agile than its brothers and sisters in the herd.

To emphasize this unusual point of view just once more, let’s look at Procter & Gamble from the outside, from our vantage point as a part of the consumer ecosystem in which P & G’s products and services must survive.

We know that the products and all their variations do not appear magically on the retailer’s shelf. We know that P & G has thousands of employees manufacturing (replicating) the products and working on new variations for us.

In just the same way, we know that the DNA and its team of proteins do all the work of replication for living organisms. However, from our point of view as consumers, it seems as if new consumer products simply appear on the shelf. In our role as part of the consumer marketplace ecosystem, we select certain products and reject others. The company (species) dutifully records our choices in its records (DNA) and then replicates more products based on our selection.

Bear with me as we continue using this metaphor to understand what lessons the evolutionary process of selection may have for successful businesses.

Next time, we will continue our exploration of the evolutionary selection process. We will delve deeper into more subtle ways that environmental selection forces species to adapt—specifically how the environment forces each species to focus on its comparative strengths.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 2nd, 2008 at 5:30 am and is filed under Business info, Richard Barrett. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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