Closer To The Ideal

This is awesome. In fact, I wish I’d written this:

This guy has gone to the zoo and interviewed all the animals. The tiger says that the secret to success is to live alone, be well disguised, have sharp claws and know how to stalk. The snail says that the secret is to live inside a solid shell, stay small, hide under dead trees and move slowly around at night. The parrot says that success lies in eating fruit, being alert, packing light, moving fast by air when necessary, and always sticking by your friends.His conclusion: These animals are giving contradictory advice! And that’s because they’re all “outliers”.

But both of these points are subtly misleading. Yes, the advice is contradictory, but that’s only a problem if you imagine that the animal kingdom is like a giant arena in which all the world’s animals battle for the Animal Best Practices championship [1], after which all the losing animals will go extinct and the entire world will adopt the winning ways of the One True Best Animal. But, in fact, there are a hell of a lot of different ways to be a successful animal, and they coexist nicely. Indeed, they form an ecosystem in which all animals require other, much different animals to exist.

We can learn a lot by studying Apple and Google and 37 Signals, but in the end, we have to come up with something unique.

This entry was posted on Saturday, February 14th, 2009 at 6:55 pm and is filed under business. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.