How the second law of thermodynamics acts upon your business.

Come on, it’s not rocket surgery is it!

This malapropism was often heard in my office a few years ago, along with, ‘You can take a horse to water, but you can’t make it think.’ We’d laugh behind our hands and shoot each other knowing glances.

These were the pre-Brexit days. They were simpler times. Using the correct words in their proper context seemed important then. Now, we just say what we want and, as long as some spoil sport doesn’t Google it, it is accepted as fact. The difference between ‘evidence’ and ‘opinion’ is no longer important.

Opinion is everywhere, we are bombarded by it on every page of our newspaper, every click of our mouse, every swipe of our smart phone. An opinion, if quoted often enough, takes on the appearance of fact. Wisdom is simply the assurance gained by enough people voicing the same opinion often enough.

Theories are opinions that can be tested and are generally expressed as a premise in the form of an equation.

My theorem is rather elegantly expressed as Opinion + Evidence = Fact (O+e=F)

There is another elegantly expressed theory, though not nearly so easy to explain.

S = k. log W

I’ll just leave that to sink in.

If the boy at the back with his hand up was saying, “Boltzmann’s Theory, Sir.” He’d be right.

Ludwig Boltzmann (1844 – 1906) formulated his equation around 1875 to explain the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics and something called ‘entropy’.

Entropy is that property in life that causes dishes to pile up in the sink when you’ve been alone in the house for the weekend and not actually had as much as cup of coffee (true story). Entropy is the tendency for everything to descend into chaos. It is why sandcastles are washed away by the sea rather than miraculously appear when the tide goes out. It’s why you can’t make a raw egg out of an omelette. And it is also why we can’t get Brexit done.

Entropy is why the universe will one day end. Good old entropy.

It is also why we go to work each day telling ourselves that we mustn’t let S = k. log W happen. At least some of us do.

The point is, your business, or your career, or your job, or your current project will only go one way unless you impart some energy upon it. Left alone, everything decays, crumbles and falls into disrepair. Ask my dentist.

We live in changing times, we always have. But the times seem to be a-changin’ more quickly each year. A few years ago, it would have struck me as odd hearing my next-door neighbour, at 1am, shouting “Alexa! Open the garage door.” Now it is merely inconsiderate, annoying and a reason to cut my lawn at 6 o’clock the next morning.

However, change is something to which we must react. Change doesn’t simply wash over us in the same way a shower of rain drenches all who stand in it. If we do nothing to our business, entropy will take over. You cannot simply expect individual businesses to automatically transform into a shining examples of commercial enterprise simply because their industry or profession in general has gone through a period of radical change. It falls to the entire workforce to adapt and learn from past experience and embrace new ideas and directives.

Stand back for a moment and have a look. Where can you improve, what can you do better, what are your competitors doing that is getting results and what are they doing that you don’t like.

See what is working and do more of it. See what is bad and do the opposite.

The biggest mistake you can make is to do nothing and hope that the market will be good to you.

So, it’s NOT rocket surgery. It’s the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics. Thanks Boltzmann, you rock.