Re: Business is more like War than a bed of gladioloas!

Roland Foerster (foerster@dial.eunet.ch)
Wed, 11 Jan 95 09:27:05 +0100

Charles

I was partly following the conversation on 'Business is war'.

You wrote:
> War encompasses much Darwinian theory. The strongest, canniest, best
> prepared, and luckiest, survive--propagating that community rather
> than species.

I guess fortunately nature isn't really functioning on such a
single-minded assumption you're proposing in your message. First of
all, if you read Darwin, you'll see that he said: survival of the
fittest (not the strongest, canniest .) Fit, in this context, means
the one which is best prepared for it's actual environment. In most
of the situations this means not only physical strength, but mostly
adaptiveness, efficient use of resources, in general 'sustainable'
treatment of the environment.

Besides this, nature obviously has more than one strategy developed
for survival. If you take a closer look actually the most widely
used strategy is cooperation (e.g. in symbiosis). But of course all
this fighting of animals fits very well in this mental model to
describe 'business as war' as being 'natural'. And if it's natural,
how could you and why should you change it???? So let's leave it the
way it is: business as war! (Very easy isn't it?)

The strategy of fighting comes only in when there is a situation of
limited resources. There - from my point of view - is the problem
with 'business as war': We see a lot of resources as limited (in our
mental model) although they are not at all limited. Example: money.
Money in total isn't a limited resource at all (there is enough for
everybody on this planet). But our thinking (our mental models)
suggest that it *IS* limited. The rest is obvious: we're fighting
for it *plus* we're keeping it if we have some of this highly
limited resource. This works for many other resources too.
The point is, that if the resources *are* limited, war (not meant
negative) is always leading to WIN/LOSE !

> As long as folks
> like me run businesses and teach corporate strategy to eager students
> wanting to leave their mark onthe world, those of you who ignore us
> will be toast.

Nice to know.

> Its time to stop looking at the world as your mother and view it as a
> planet.

There is at least one striking argument against this sentence: we
are dependent on nature, nature is *NOT* dependent on us!

Yours

Roland Foerster

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