At CEOForum de Porto Alegre 2016 I’ve attended to the excellent talk from professor and consultant Mussak. He talked about Darwinism, especially about an experiment Darwin performed at the Galápagos Islands.
Charles Darwin in 1868
Galápagos, in Ecuador, is an archipelago containing about 20 closely located islands, but distant enough so a certain type of bird is not able to fly from one to another.
Galápagos
Darwin verified that there was this bird very similar in some islands, only with a little difference depending on the island it lived in. This bird evolved according to the island’s ecosystem.
In one of the islands the bird had a narrower beak and curved at the tip. On this island there were a lot of tall trees with some insects from which the bird fed (the curve on the beak helped to catch the insect in tree’s hole).
On the other island the bird had the beak harder and shorter. On this island the most abundant food was hard-shell nuts.
On some other island the bird had the beak long and thin, good to eat fruits, found abundantly on this island.
Well, you got this point: the beak of the bird exemplifies an adaptive evolution according to the food available in the environment.
So Darwin made the following experience: he took some birds from one island and put them on another.
What usually happened is that the birds died of starvation. Not because they couldn’t catch food. They could. But the other birds on that island were faster on getting food. They were more adapted to the environment. Therefore, the less adapted birds get none or very little food, and ended up dying of starvation.
But some types of birds were faster at adapting to changes (of being relocated to another island). Those didn’t starve.
What Darwin concluded wasn’t that only these birds could live in other islands. But their species would be more apt to evolve and survive on their original island.
The point Darwin noted is that the island itself will change through time (imagine 500 years). And the species most apt to evolve are the ones that are going to survive.
Now, think of how was the business world 50 years ago and how it is nowadays with the acceleration of digital transformation.
Your company could be compared to that bird. If it moved from that island (market), it would probably die.
However, it used to be ok. A hundred, fifty, or twenty years ago, that wasn’t a problem. Because there was no “Darwin on the business world” and your company wouldn’t change from one market to another (such as Darwin moved a bird from one island to another).
But today things are different. The changes on your island (market) happen very fast. It’s the acceleration of digital transformation.
No one is going to move you from your island. But your island is going to change. Look at hotels chains and AirBnB; the cab cooperatives and Uber; the banks and the FinTechs. There are more and more examples coming up on the last years. And it’s getting faster and faster.
Innovation is not a matter of transformation. It’s a matter of survival!
What about your company? Is it picking the same food as always?
If you still don’t have an innovation and digital transformation agenda, pick up the pace and create one, fast, because if you don’t evolve you are going to disappear.
