How to profit from the lessons of keystone species in business

Just like nature showed us that the wolf, sea otter and other keystone species are essential for their ecosystems to flourish, corporate boards and company owners are realizing that the same principle applies in business: A weak keystone process will always result in a weak team, lower cash flow and insufficient buffers against industry challenges. And understanding how to strengthen this one process presents a great opportunity to make the entire company flourish again.

The 2016 book and now award-winning short film, The Serengeti Rules, shows us how certain keystone species are more important than others for the health of their ecosystems. That by removing the wolf from Yellowstone and the jaguar from river islands in South America, resulted in a fast and significant deterioration of the respective ecosystems. And that their reintroduction resulted in an equally fast recovery of the entire system.

The thought of applying this principle in business first came to me when I remembered a comment I heard in business some decades ago. Someone told me in the ‘90s that every successful business needs a dreamer, a businessman and a son of a bitch (SOB). Now, that may sound funny and tongue in cheek, but throughout my career as a Certified Turnaround Professional (CTP), I found this statement to be true too often to be dismissed. Each time I arrived at an underperforming company, I would notice that one of the three were absent – and most of the time it was the SOB – the wolf. With some research I found that this statement was written back in 1904 already, and has stood the test of time ever since.

We all agree that no company need a SOB per se, so let’s look at why this statement still works so well today. A typical company’s distress story may go something like this: “we were doing fine, and managed to acquire a competitor in a great deal, and then we were hit by a “perfect storm” of external events in our industry.” After hearing this story a few times, we have to ask ourselves “how can these storms be this perfect every time?” That is where the presence of a SOB makes all the difference – in that boardroom when the decision is made to acquire the competitor, or to diversify, or to otherwise go out on a limb and take some risk, the SOB in the team will simply say “are you out of your minds”, “over my dead body” or “not on my watch” and demand that the decision be better balanced based on available cash flow and human resources. So, it is not so much that a company needs a SOB, but that it needs a balanced team that can consider the popular and unpopular facts around each major decision.

Jack Welch at General Electric was a true pioneer in applying the keystone process to his management style. By demanding that the bottom 10% of a manager’s people needs to be removed on a continuous basis, he was doing what the wolf does in Yellowstone – ensuring that the GE ecosystem keeps flourishing. But after earning the name “neutron Jack” he also found out how unpopular this system was. After all, if the elk in Yellowstone had a choice, they would never vote for the wolf pack to be there. Like all species, they would vote for more comfort every time. So, Jack had to learn how to run a balanced keystone process by introducing his Crotonville university for managerial development, and to continuously provide the mentorship, rewards and human touch needed to bring the best out of his people.

During my compulsory Navy training early in my career, I was lucky enough to stumble onto a realization that would change the rest of my life: that as an individual, I had absolutely no idea of what I was truly capable of. Even though it was against my will and unpopular at the time, the Navy showed me over and over again that I was capable of going WAY beyond what I perceived my limits to be.

We also learn a lot from this principle in sports – where uncle Toni Nadal instilled a tough and sometimes unpopular discipline in his cousin, Rafa Nadal, which eventually helped him to possibly become the greatest tennis ?player of all time. Or as the excellent book, The Talent Code, explains how obscure tennis clubs in Argentina and Russia can defy the odds and consistently produce world class athletes from a small talent pool – proving that talent is much more nurture over nature than we may want to believe. Other leaders like Steve Jobs had the ability to create a “reality distortion field” when they talked about their vision for the company, allowing their people to believe that those who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones that do. These are all examples of the many different ways leaders can maintain a healthy keystone process in their business and teams to lift them to a level they never knew they were capable of. The end result is a team coming to work with the same positive tension that Hussain Bolt will feel in the starting blocks, ready to show what they are made of in the hours ahead!

The leader must also provide the tools for people to see where their performance stand on a very regular basis. A manager may feel that they did a great job by getting their team onto popular Asana or Monday.com, but that could have the same effect than releasing a pack of housecats into Yellowstone! Without rigorous key performance indicators that go beyond financial results into the operational difference the team makes on a weekly basis, technology tools can often be made to be popular, rather than to drive real business results. That is why I wrote my book, The Forces of Progress, and why I developed YourSensei.org which is an online people development accelerator – like an online version of Jack’s Crotonville management development center, which automatically sends an email every Monday with a person’s continuous improvement credits, yellow to black belt progress, and credits for implementing new concepts learned. A beta version is available for coaches and partners upon request.???

Below is a checklist for maintaining a healthy keystone process in your company:

-?????????Do you have a SOB – an executive who can stand up and present the unpopular facts when the team is sold on a popular but risky plan?

-?????????Do your people know where they stand on their contribution to the team’s operational performance? Preferably communicated with a pull-based weekly dashboard.

-?????????Do your people have a system that tracks and rewards their development towards the company’s goals – like YourSensei.org?????

Schedule a discussion and consider our 2-day opportunity assessment to quantify the untapped opportunities available to your companies or clients.

In an increasingly uncertain world, reintroducing the wolf into your Yellowstone will return the stability and cash buffers your teams require to pounce on opportunities when they present themselves during the upcoming “perfect storms”.

Contact:

Kobus van der Zel, CTP

Partner

RCPI

[email protected]

(312) 375-2218

References:

The Serengeti Rules, 2016, Sean B. Carroll, Princeton University Press.

The Serengeti Rules, Short film, winner of 2018 Wildscreen Panda and Jackson Hole Science Media Awards, 53min; Watch free on PBS here: https://www.pbs.org/video/the-serengeti-rules-41dfru/

The Talent Code, 2009, Daniel Coyle.

The Forces of Progress, 2006, Kobus van der Zel, Lulu; https://www.amazon.com/Forces-Progress-Kobus-Van-Zel/dp/1430307099.

YourSensei.org; The online people development accelerator by Kobus van der Zel.