Learn from Nature - How to Win Fun and Freedom

You're working all hours and have no friends or hobbies. Your family think you're a distant relative.

You complain about not being able to find time to make improvements to your business.

You dash from one crisis to next. Embarrassing and costly mistakes are being made by your staff. Cost and time lost to rework creeps higher.

You even begin to revel as an expert fire fighter or trouble-shooter.

Reacting to demands all time, who said running your own business was fun and would give you freedom to do your own thing?

How did you find yourself in this state? Simply, you and your staff are human. Humans make mistakes and forget things, especially when they are in a hurry or lack experience.

So, What Can we Learn from Nature

Nature has produced complex, powerful, elegant, awe-inspiring, incredibly capable organisms and species that have evolved, thrived, and survived for millions of years.

Species compete for food and shelter. They also face threat of disease. Species survive using their traits and capabilities...their genes.

Business is like a species you need to compete for business to survive, and to defend yourself against business diseases such as fire fighting or complacency.

Your business, like a species, exhibits distinct traits and capabilities derived from your skills, experience and upbringing -your business genes.

Here's How Nature Creates Incredibly Capable Species:

1)Living things evolve in small low-risk incremental steps not in giant high-risk steps. They adapt to their environment all time to improve their chances of survival.

What's natures strategy?

The environment eliminates species that cant cope and only keeps those who can meet Survival of Fittest rules. Nature doesn't have a vision statement, foresight, mission statement, or manifesto.

It simple uses this process of natural selection. Nature just takes one small step at a time to improve its current survival chances building on best or fittest and removing least fit.

2)Nature builds everything in small independent modules or building blocks genes. A gene is a length of DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) a long list of instructions or template on how to put organism together and make it work well. Genes determine features, traits and capabilities of organism.

3)The DNA genetic structure gives outstanding stability. The gene building blocks give stability. The probability of any particular part of a gene being miscopied on any one copying or reproduction occasion is approximately one in a 1,000,000,000 (1 billion). It happens but it takes a considerably length of time for an error or mutation to occur. The lifetime of DNA messages of genetic code measures in millions of years.

Genetic stability preserves useful and best characteristics that meet environments needs. It ensures that favourable characteristics travel from one generation to next.

Yet, in nature, complex, powerful, elegant, awe-inspiring, incredibly capable organisms and species have evolved, thrived, and survived for millions of years. This has been achieved through an incredibly simple process of natural selection or 'survival of fittest', first detailed by Darwin in 19th century, now confirmed by science of genetics.

In business, we are encouraged to have strategies, vision and mission statements, and objectives to ensure our success and survival, but success of business as a whole is still questionable, with few companies really thriving over substantial periods-of-time. Major issues continually present themselves, for example, competing with ever-increasing number of conglomerates, recruiting and retaining appropriate staff, new and recurring old diseases, and rapidly changing technology.

We need a better way of coping, a simple process that is robust and proven - not latest management fad. Could we use this model from nature, principles of natural selection and genetics? The answer, I believe, is yes.

In nature, it is environment - competition for food, shelter, mates, prevalence of disease, and predation, that dictates who is fittest. The fittest displaces less fit in population. What determines your success and survival chances in ever-changing environment - is genetic make up of you and your team.

Your genes determine your traits or features and capabilities.