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Innovate And Grow Your Business Through The Recession

NOW is the perfect time to “introduce something new” to your business. While your competitors are trying to figure out “what happened” with the recession, or while they remain preoccupied with trying to stay in business, your business could be growing through the downturn by innovating.

Most businesses today are overly focused on just trying to keep the doors open.  Very few are (yet) trying to solve the business problems that will help them thrive through this economic downturn. The few business owners that are smart enough to innovate now will lead the way through the recession.  To do this, they will have to learn what the Blue Tit knows.

Extract from: The Living Company by Arie de Geus, Nicholas Brealey, 1999

The United Kingdom has a long standing system of delivering milk in bottles to the door. At the beginning of the 20th century these milk bottles had no top. Birds had easy access to the cream which settled in the top of the bottle. Two different species of British garden birds, the Blue Tits and red robins, learned to siphon up cream from the bottles and tap this new, rich food source.

This innovation, in itself, was already quite an achievement. But it also had an evolutionary effect. The cream was much richer than the usual food sources of these birds, and the two species underwent some adaptation of their digestive systems to cope with the unusual nutrients. This internal adaptation almost certainly took place through Darwinian selection.

Then, between the two world wars, the UK dairy distributors closed access to the food source by placing aluminum seals on their bottles.

By the early 1950’s the entire Blue Tit population of the UK, about a million birds, had learned how to pierce the aluminum seals. Regaining access to this rich food source provided an important victory for the Blue Tit family as a whole; it gave them an advantage in the battle for survival. Conversely, the robins, as a family, never regained access to the cream. Occasionally, an individual robin learns how to pierce the seals of the milk bottle. But the knowledge never passes to the rest of the species.

In short, the Blue Tits went through an extraordinarily successful institutional learning process. The robins failed, even though individual robins had been as innovative as individual Blue Tits. Moreover, the difference could not be attributed to their ability to communicate. As songbirds, both the Blue Tits and the robins had the same wide range of means of communication: color, behavior, movements, and song. The explanation could be found only in the social propagation process: the way Blue Tits spread their skill from one individual to members of the species as a whole.

In spring, the Blue Tits live in couples until they have reared their young. By early summer, when the young Blue Tits are flying and feeding on their own, we see birds moving from garden to garden in flocks of eight to ten individuals. These flocks seem to remain intact, moving together around the countryside, and the period of mobility lasts for two to three months.

Robins, by contrast, are territorial birds. A male robin will not allow another male to enter its territory. When threatened, the robin sends a warning, as if to say “Keep the hell out of here.” In general, red robins tend to communicate with each other in an antagonistic manner, with fixed boundaries that they do not cross.

Birds that flock, seem to learn faster.  They increase their chances to survive and evolve more quickly.

Here are five tools that will help you flock like a Blue Tit in 2009:

1. Quickly and efficiently organize your thoughts and communicate your ideas throughout your company with the Mindjet MindManager (www.mindjet.com).  We love our mind maps!
2. Use the Survey Methods tool to find out what’s on our customers’ minds.  Survey Methods (www.surveymethods.com) is an online survey tool that has robust data analysis and presentation capabilities. Ask your customers and you might be surprised by what they tell you - really!
3. Where we go to find professionals that can set up our surveys so that the data we retrieve will be of some use, or that can assist us with virtually anything else. Elance (www.elance.com) is an online workplace where businesses connect with qualified professionals to get work done. The site offers a number of consultants with expertise in statistics, survey design, web development, ghost writing, etc.
4. Rent A Coder (www.rentacoder.com)is another online marketplace for highly skilled professionals that work on your behalf.
5. A great place to share your ideas and successes.  Your online collaboration tool from Google Docs (www.google.com/sites/help/intl/en/overview.html) that lets any business of any size create and manage its own intranet site.

The moral of the Blue Tit Story:

Innovation is rarely an individual accomplishment.  A tight-knit community introducing new ideas and sharing successes is more likely to produce innovative changes - changes that will ensure the success of the group. That is the key to growing through the recession.

Grow Your Business, Live Your Dream!

Leamon A. Crooms

Guru of Growth

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