Monoculture is Death
If life is diverse, then monoculture is death, if not just dead boring. Can you say potato famine? Up to 1.5 million people died because of a monoculture! With crops, companies, or cultures, a lack of diversity is never a good idea. My girlfriend is a foodie, and we were watching a Michael Pollan documentary, The Botany of Desire, a few nights ago. I learned that 99.9 % of apple orchards in the west are monocultures. They don’t grow from seeds but from cloning – watch the movie or read the book if you want to know more. We have similar issues with potatoes; most potatoes in the US are the same strain. Why is this bad?
If you grow a crop without sexual reproduction, you’ve cut out evolution from the growing process. Which means you get reliable and predictable results, not bad right? The bad part is that the things that are trying to eat your crops, molds, bacteria, insects, and other pests, are evolving. Since all of the crops in a field, a town, or in some cases, the entire country are the same, one effective pest could kill the entire crop nationwide before anyone had time to react.
We use pesticides to keep these pests away from our crops. There are farms and orchards that are diversifying their crops, but not many, and some people are using GMO crops to introduce evolutionary advantages to mono-crops. Most of these folks are beholding to big agra and have to grow what makes the most profit.
I’m using crops as a metaphor. The same is true for cultures and companies. When a company is run in a command-and-control fashion, a mono-leadership is making most of the decisions. Companies that run this way have built-in limitations that restrict their sustainability. Diversity of leadership and vision lead to transparency and innovation.
After reading Steven Johnson's new book, Where Good Ideas Come From, I started thinking about connecting the monoculture issue we have in the farming industry with issues we are having with businesses. The book contrasts evolution with innovation and draws many parallels between Mother Nature’s and human innovation - striking similarities.
Are You at Your Best?
Do you strive to get better at what you do? Whether it’s fixing cars, selling shoes, or programming software? Or are you already at your best? Getting better at something you care deeply about is called personal mastery. Peter Senge, in his book, The Fifth Discipline, says,” Personal mastery goes beyond competence and skills, though it is grounded in competence and skill. It means approaching one’s life as a creative work, living life from a creative as opposed to a reactive viewpoint.” Mastery is a lifelong practice.
“The ability to focus on ultimate intrinsic desires, not only on secondary goals, is a cornerstone of personal mastery,” says Peter Senge. The key to mastery is following your passion and creativity, not going to meetings and putting out fires. When you’re able to do what you want to do, when you want to do it with who you want to work with, you’re much more likely to achieve mastery. This is at the heart of intrinsic motivation, or motivation that comes spontaneously from within us - doing things for the joy of doing them.
Very few of us are fully engaged at work because workplaces use top-down management and carrots and sticks to motivate people. You can’t sell, enforce or cajole mastery - it has to be something we choose to do.
It’s the reason I’ve been successful in my various careers. I’ve been able to define my roles and that of my teams. I’ve had the trust of upper management to do things the way I think they should be done, to hire the right people, and make what I think are the best purchases for my workplace. For the last 20 years, I’ve had a large amount of autonomy, which led to developing personal mastery. As Somerset Maugham said, “Only mediocre people are always at their best.”
