Business Insight Zone

One of the underlying themes in my worldview of business is that we often see the same issues arise at different scales.

This is on my mind today after I encountered a choice tidbit in Esquire’s December 2008 profile (not online, best I can tell) on uber-inventor Dean Kamen, whose company DEKA channels its founder’s many, many ideas into useful ends. In this quote — all emphasis is in the original — Kamen explains his excitement when, as a boy, he encountered the work of Isaac Newton:

“F = ma, that’s a pretty simple linear equation. Force equals mass times acceleration. You can’t come up with a more simple statement that’s not trivial. Yet it describes the motion of billiard balls and of galaxies. On a galactic scale, you can predict where the next eclipse will be because of F = ma. You can predict where atomic collisions happen because of F = ma. That’s astounding.”

Now, I don’t believe that business can be boiled down as mathematically as the laws of physics, simply because business involves too much of the messiness of human thinking. But it’s useful to think about which business concepts do apply across many scales.

For instance, we know that individuals tend to have blind spots around pet theories, cherished habits, and the people closest to them. Related to this, we know that many people tend to avoid negative evidence or anything else that would cause them to question the validity or worth of these biases. (Try talking to a diehard sports fan or political partisan about the shortcomings of the leaders on their team of choice and see what it gets you.)

Surely all of us have seen the same dynamic happen in the group psychology of a team or a department or a whole company that cannot stand to question certain things: fundamental concepts of operations (”We’re in the news paper business“) or modes of operation (”No woman has ever been our COO”) or even beloved employees (”But Jimmy’s been here for twenty-five years!”).

When we contemplate these similarities across scale, it seems clear that it could be fruitful to figure out how individuals can learn from better organizational practices and how organizations can learn from better individual practices to rectify those blind spots, or to minimize the damage that they create.

My hunch is that this scale-based thinking works across many areas of business. We’ve heard a glib — but probably true — version of it lately when observers of the economy have talked about the need for households, businesses, and nations alike to do a better job of living within their means.

Now it’s YOUR turn:

Where else does scales-of-endeavor analysis help us think more clearly
about how we do business now and how we could do it better going forward?

I look forward to learning from you, so please load me up with comments!

~

Image from the Norman B. Leventhal Map Center of the Boston Public Library, found via Flickr.

Category: Management, The working life