"Whitwell Elwin, editor of the respected British journal the Quarterly Review, was sent an advance copy of a new book by the naturalist Charles Darwin. Elwin read the book with interest and agreed that it had merit, but feared that the subject matter was too narrow to attract a wide audience. He urged Darwin to write a book about pigeons instead. 'Everyone is interested in pigeons,' he observed helpfully. Elwin's sage advice was ignored, and 'On the Origin of Species' was published." - From "A Short History of Almost Everything," by Bill Bryson
Lee Iacocca calls his latest book "Where Have All the Leaders Gone?" Well, Lee, they're working. And don't you bother them. They've stopped putting themselves in commercials like you did, stopped Trump-eting themselves, and realized that fame is a serious business distraction. The more accurate question you might have asked is "Where have all the egomaniacal, self-promoting businesspeople gone?"
The answer to that may be found in the book "Good to Great," where Jim Collins reports that the best-performing leaders are the quiet, humble ones. High-profile braggadocio is out. No wonder the most famous corporate spokespeople are, for the moment, not people, but a frustrated duck and a smooth-talking gecko.
What got me thinking about where the leaders have gone was attending a National Geographic magazine presentation featuring two of its photographers, a husband-and-wife team, Beverly and Dereck Joubert, who live in Africa, studying lions. Their presentation made me rethink my position on "Darwinian management." I've argued hotly against that practice because its most notable feature is the axing of a certain percentage of the staff each year, usually the bottom 10 percent. Stupid. It's a wasteful and vicious policy, because a procedure I call "de-hiring" could save most of those employees and turn one-third or more into stars. (There's a free video on de-hiring at dauten.com.)
Still, I've come to believe that there's much to learn from Darwin as an interpreter of the creative genius of Mother Nature. For instance, the National Geographic photographers showed pictures of massive male lions and pointed out that their average tenure as head of a pride was about two years. Now what happened to that fact in Darwinian management?
But let's get practical. Say we work together in a company and agree that we want to evolve our products/services the most quickly. And let's say that we study Mother Nature to learn about efficient evolution. What would we do differently?
First off, we'd become masters of variation. If you believe in God - and if you don't . . . well, God bless you - and you look at the world for clues as to the nature of the Creator, then you have to conclude that He's an experimenter. If we emulated that wisdom, every project in every department would include an experiment. We'd have so many that only 1 in 100 would have to be a real improvement. (Going back to the stories from the photographers, the lions they follow eat water buffalo. They can kill a calf at will. So how does the buffalo adapt? They have so many offspring that the lions can't eat them all. That's how it would be with ideas in a company with true Darwinian management.)
Further, if we study Darwin, we see that the real origin of his theory arose from studying animal breeders. Darwin himself bred pigeons. That's how he learned about breeding for specific desirable traits. What if we took that approach with employees? No, not having them mate (although I can hardly wait to see how the offspring of Andre Agassi and Steffi Graf turn out), but having their ideas mate by creating work teams with specific traits in mind. For instance, you might put a financial genius and an engineering genius in the same office and see if they inspire one another.
And speaking of teams, I also learned from the National Geographic folks that lions are not at the top of the food chain. No, that would be hyenas. We were shown film of a group of hyenas confronting lions at a kill. You could practically see the lions thinking, "Yeah, we could beat these guys in a fight, but it would get ugly, just like those stinking hyenas." Then the lions slink off. The hyenas teach us the beauty of ugly. But there's another great Darwinian lesson there: It's not the size of the jaw; it's the speed of the bite.
Dale Dauten is a syndicated columnist. He can be reached at dale@dauten.com.
