Tony Nicholls
London is under attack.
As I speak, thousands of airborne invaders fill the capital’s air, buzzing around its parks, crawling into buildings, tangling in people’s hair and generally creating disruption. I speak, of course, about Harmonia Axyridis, aka the Harlequin ladybird – and the latest in a long line of immigrants to threaten our native British fauna and flora. Even Twitter is buzzing with it.
But while it may be infesting most London buildings, looking for a warm corner to hibernate in before the winter arrives, how has it managed to wriggle its way into this blog?
A natural instinct
The easy answer lies in the fact that, here at our company, we are Nature’s children, and irresistibly interested in everything that goes on in the animal kindom. But there is a second and more lasting relevance. It strikes me that our gut reaction to the arrival of invader species like this is much like our tendency to resist strange and new business practices.
Whether it is Japanese Knotweed strangling the life out of your prize hibiscus, or the aggressive grey squirrel driving out its vulnerably, tufty-eared red cousin, there is an uncanny parallel with the way we see some new ideas as somehow undesirable simply because they are new and different.
To hear some people speak, you would think that grey squirrels travelled round the English woodland in teenage packs, setting upon every red squirrel they met. The truth is that they are simply better at surviving. They have larger broods, they have a wider diet, they are hardier. They do not seek out and destroy red squirrels, they outperform them and end up replacing them as a species, not as individuals. But we nevertheless see them as alien, dangerous and undesirable.
And so it is with business. We are creatures of habit and it is therefore completely natural that we should see new ideas with some suspicion. So when we assess each business innovation that comes along, it is not surprising we feel an irrational fear of the unknown.
At our company, we help companies to make conference calls instead of travelling to meetings. People like this and it is what we do for a living. But to some people, the idea of having a conference call instead of the usual face-to-face meeting is just not the way things are done. It is strange and new: it is the Japanese Knotweed of modern commerce, the grey squirrel of business practice.
But before we condemn, let’s just try to remember that the real reasons for these things arriving and flourishing is because they work better. And while you don’t necessarily want them buzzing into your hair, let’s celebrate the arrival of the Harlequin ladybird – and free conference calling via our company – as part of the natural way of things.
It was meant to be.
[photo credit: Jonathan Gill, Flickr]
Shaz Manelli
