Life on the African savanna can be a dangerous place, especially if you’re an animal. Predators that possess astonishing strength, razor-sharp teeth and claws, and cunning camouflage lurk everywhere and are often just waiting to make some poor, less unfortunate creature on the food chain their next meal without the slightest compunction.
One strategy for surviving in this perilous environment is to be at least one step speedier than your slowest colleague. It is a fitting analogy for today’s business environment and Juan Enriquez, in his book As the Future Catches You, summarized this line of thinking thusly: “Every morning a gazelle wakes and thinks, ‘To stay alive, I have to run faster than the fastest lion.’”
It’s a marvelous strategy provided you are fleet of foot. If not, the strategy is nothing more than a temporary salve for a day or two because as Enriquez adds, “Just over the hill, a lion has realized, ‘I have to run faster than the slowest gazelle, or I’ll go hungry.’”
Fortunately there is a better way of surviving on the African plains, and it offers two distinct advantages over this survival-of-the-fittest strategy. Moreover, it is instructive for businesses and organizations looking to remain competitive in tomorrow’s exponential economy.
What is the strategy? Playing off your neighbors’ strength. Many animals survive on the savanna by working in partnership with other animals. One of the better-known examples is the unusual affiliation among wildebeests, zebras, and ostriches.
Alone each species is vulnerable. Together, though, this unlikely triumvirate forms an impressive survival team. Wildebeests have very good hearing but poor eyesight and a distressingly poor sense of smell. Zebras, on the other hand, only have modest hearing but are blessed with very keen sniffers, while ostriches possess excellent eyesight. By relying on the relative strengths of the other animals, the trio can often detect predators well in advance and take the necessary precautions to keep the threat at bay.
The same tactic can be employed in today’s business environment. The convergence of sensors and information technology within the health-care arena is causing leading medical providers to look to semiconductor companies as new partners.
On a different scale, some companies are even trying to form in-house teams that can do a better job of spotting potential dangers. For instance, Eli Lilly, the large drug manufacturer, now relies on groups of “semi-experts” to help it determine which drug candidates should be allowed to proceed to Phase III clinical trials. (The decision is not inconsequential because of the time, money, and resources at stake.)
To use the animal analogy, imagine marketing executives as having good hearing for helping determine which drugs will do best in the commercial marketplace, molecular biologists as having the best eyesight for determining which drug molecules might be most effective, and regulatory and legal specialists as having the better sense of smell in selecting the drugs FDA regulators might be willing to accept.
Of course, diversity isn’t only useful in warning of lurking dangers; it is also helpful in avoiding traps in the first place. The classic example, which was so adroitly profiled in the classic book Groupthink by Irving Janis, is the Bay of Pigs fiasco–the Kennedy administration’s ill-advised plan to send a group of Cuban exiles into a swampy bay in Cuba in the hopes of sparking a popular uprising against Fidel Castro’s communist regime.
After the humiliating defeat, President Kennedy demanded his administration study the failure of the invasion. What he learned is that he and his staff–many of whom had been schooled at the country’s top universities–were a cohesive group but they all tended to think too much alike. In short, his staff was not diverse enough.
Had Kennedy and his advisors sought the advice of other military experts, Cuban exiles, and other interested and knowledgeable parties outside of their immediate circle, the problem might have been avoided. (Luckily Kennedy learned his lesson and successfully applied many of the findings toward the peaceful resolution of the Cuban missile crisis just a year later.)
The business world is chock full of examples of businesses tapping into the power of diversity. Stephanie Capparell, in her book The Real Pepsi Challenge, documents how as early as the mid-1940s Pepsi had hired African-Americans to figure out how to market Pepsi to “the Negro market,” and the company determined that its continued commitment to diversity was responsible for attributing one full percentage point of its 7.4 percent revenue growth–or $250 million–to new products inspired by diversity.
Similarly Ford Motor Company credits one of its more notable successes of the past few decades to diversity. Many of the unique features of the minivan were not the work of clever and empathetic engineers but rather were the product of multiple minds working together to devise a product that would serve different peoples needs. For instance, disabled workers recommended sliding doors, mothers looking for some help with storing their children’s drinks asked for cup holders, and the elderly needed some assistance in discerning when obstacles might be behind them and requested a sensor that beeped.
Scores of other companies have also moved in a big way to embrace diversity. IBM, Google, and Microsoft among others are moving abroad and are doing so not only to be closer to their markets and have access to inexpensive and talented labor but also because Indians, Chinese, Europeans, and Africans all have different sets of “senses,” and they can see, hear, or smell both threats and opportunities that are not always obvious to others.
