If you’re interested in NI – Natural Intelligence, read here.
It’s October, it’s California.
One of our Hummingbirds is eating pollen at the entrance of the VALIMET Orchard.
There are several Managerial tips that this variety of birds displays for us. Today we’ll only present three.
Let’s begin: did you know that Hummingbirds have the fastest metabolism of any vertebrate, burning Energy per gram of body weight up to 12 times faster than a pigeon?
Think of an early stage start-up company with a high monthly burn rate.
- Spending discipline.
An Energy strategy is essential just to stay alive: Hummingbirds must consume more than half their body weight in nectar each day and enter a nightly “torpor” (a mini-hibernation) to conserve energy.
Think of an Ethical code for founders of start-ups at their first seeding rounds: there’s a reference to that in the excellent book “The Messy Middle“, by revered author Scott Belsky. - Fast Prototyping & Iteration.
Each flower visit is an act of rapid experimentation: angle, distance, hovering stability, depth of the beak. The bird instantly adjusts based on a full spectrum of feedbacks: wind, light, shape of the bloom.
That’s the biological version of Iteration: fast feedback loops leading to optimized behavior.
For Hummingbirds, who live in an Energy economy, unoptimized pollen-harvesting would mean death. In Business: do we have the luxury to allow slow processes optimization? - “Fast is better than Good” (Belsky).
Hummingbirds may look frantic: over 1,200 beats per minute during flight. Speeds of 30 or 60 mph (48–97 km/h) during flight or dives.
Pure speed without control? Not quite.
Velocity doesn’t come at the expenses of precision & accuracy: their nervous systems and muscles have evolved to make high-speed and variable angle motion efficient.
Fast is Better than Good, like Scott Belsky states, meaning that Fast is the pathway to Good.
There’s more to it.
As an old Italian saying goes, “the best is the enemy of the good”. When perfection becomes our starting point, action becomes impossible — we stall, we delay, we lose the flow that leads to progress.
This truth is well known to startup founders, who are even willing to pivot their entire company when repeated failures signal the need for a new direction. The key is to fail fast — and learn faster.
In terms of Self-Management, however, the Hummingbirds and Scott Belsky are probably teaching something that many overlook.
So, a few minutes in an Orchard may suggest that the way Nature manages essential resources like Time and Energy through speed and iteration is an ongoing lecture on Leadership.
One could ask: are we allocating enough time to prompt Natural Intelligence for the tips we need?
Luigi Alzati
VP Sales and Marketing
#BusinessManagement #NaturalIntelligence
Thanks Barry McGeough for recommending “The Messy Middle”!