A Tale of Linkedin

Going through the 33 strategies of war by Greene, I saved some paragraphs that I believe are very insightful and worth the time it takes our mind in manipulation. I thought it would be nice to share the idea that dazzled me for quite some time and I am going to quote Green’s text that I divided into 4 paragraphs hoping I can deliver the idea in a form of a short story.

“Thousands of years ago, we humans elevated ourselves above the animal world and never looked back. Figuratively speaking, the key to this evolutionary advance was our powers of vision: language, and the ability to reason that it gave us, let us see more of the world around us. To protect itself from a predator, an animal depended on its senses and instincts; it could not see around the corner or to the other end of the forest.”

Going back in time to the discoveries we made through science such as gravity, physics, math etc. you can almost always know that what we reached is only little. The question we should hold in our head is; can we really say in complete certainty that these rules we placed are unchangeable? Have we really reached a point where we can write the laws & rules and keep them for more than 5 years without the need to redirect them?  I believe we can’t because we are meant to discover something new every single day.

“We humans, on the other hand, could map the entire forest, study the habits of dangerous animals and even nature itself, gaining deeper, wider knowledge of our environment. We could see dangers coming before they were here. This expanded vision was abstract: where an animal is locked in the present, we could see into the past and glimpse as far as our reason would take us into the future. Our sight expanded further and further into time and space, and we came to dominate the world. Somewhere along the line, however, we stopped evolving as rational creatures.”

The human instinct in behavioural science is defined as the innate part of behaviour that emerges without any training or education. It’s simply a fixed pattern that we tend to repeat with no fail because it comes naturally. What we normally do to change that is to use our mind and live in constant development yet it is only revolutionary and our nature always beats it. Take a moment and think what our lives could be like if we kept applying knowledge to our way of lives. I imagine that we could have been living happily ever after by now… 

“Despite our progress there is always a part of us that remains animal, and that animal part can respond only to what is most immediate in our environment--it is incapable of thinking beyond the moment. The dilemma affects us still: the two sides of our character, rational and animal, are constantly at war, making almost all of our actions awkward. We reason and plan to achieve a goal, but in the heat of action we become emotional and lose perspective.”

I could think of so many examples, however, I think a business related example like Nokia’s will be crystal clear for most. Nokia CEO after Microsoft acquired them said "we didn't do anything wrong, but somehow, we lost" and cried. That is sad really and I empathies with it yet I blame the decision maker for sliding back into his comfort zone and forgetting that we have to evolve especially when we are on the top, instead Nokia kept trying to compete with IOS and android with a technology that was not proven to be a success for quite some time. My point is to leave this dilemma of rational and animal characters behind us and really think outside the box!

“We use cleverness and strategy to grab for what we want, but we do not stop to think about whether what we want is necessary, or what the consequences of getting it will be. The extended vision that rationality brings us is often eclipsed by the reactive, emotional animal within--the stronger side of our nature. More than we are today, the ancient Greeks were close to the passage of the human race from animal to rational. To them our dual nature made us tragic, and the source of tragedy was limited vision”

That is how we always end up as humans…wishing that we could go back in time and change what we did that made us miserable, what if we stopped doing that? 

In my humble opinion, I can see one more Nokia similar story happening soon which is LinkedIn vs. Job portals and many other business support websites. Linkedin truly revolutionised the business community experience and I love it!

Yours,

M