The Rainforest: Business Icon for this Century?

“What We Learned in the Rainforest”
By Tachi Kiuchi & Bill Shireman
Berrett-Koehler Publishers Inc., 2002




Alvin Toffler (“The Third Wave”) said it a few years ago – that we were then at the threshold of a post-industrial age about to step into the “information society.” Many more social and economic prophets forewarned us to brace up for the expanded role — and rule — of information processing and distribution offices, while they announced the greatly reduced influence of the factory floor.

Side by side, however, with the exciting prospects of super abundant information being delivered with the speed of light through fiber optics, we of the third millennium are also facing the prospects of diminishing resources and increasing wastes.

While the promise of a higher quality of life is within the grasp of the 21st century individual, the specter of extinction hangs over everyone. We are optimistic in one breath, and we are overwhelmed with pessimism the next. Is this the destiny of human life on earth? What about business whose view is to exploit our natural resources so it can grow, as if nature and business cannot pro-exist? More philosophically, we ask: Is there a future for mankind – and for its preoccupations like business?

There is a book, just off the press, titled “What We Learned in the Rainforest,” which provides us a metaphor that illuminates what is actually happening and the lights the way for some definitive steps. That way, we can have the best of both worlds: businesses can continue to grow while Mother Nature remains rich, diverse and plays its role to feed and sustain us all.

“If instead of controlling nature we listen to and learn from it, we can find our way with minimal pain and maximal gain,” say Tachi Kiuchi and Bill Shireman, the authors. These people know whereof they speak. Mr. Kiuchi is chairman and CEO emeritus of Misubishi Electric America, while Mr. Shireman is chairman and CEO of Global Futures.

While this is an easy-to-read book, the concepts are neither simplistic nor shallow — because they actually go against the grain — introducing new mindsets that are short of revolutionary. They start us off with a fundamental point: Business is part of nature, and so it must work like nature with its diversity, collaborative/competitive processes, death and rebirth.

The authors — who have visited a Costa Rican rainforest and who have tried skydiving in order to use two illuminating metaphors — offer seven lessons that must be clear enough to executives like you and me.

The first lesson: Use limit to create value — close the loop. Setting off with the premise that even the rainforest has limits, the authors noted that nature has a way of preserving itself in a give and take universe (a loop). Business, they say, must also find ways to close the loop — meaning, a recovery system, where wastes are re-used in a self-nuturing cycle. The book cites the case of Coors, makers of beer, who gave birth to many other businesses because it learned from the rainforest.

The second lesson: Replace physical resources with information — and learn to do more with less. “Information has a curious quality,” the authors say. “If I give you a physical resource, then you have it, and I don’t. But if I give you information, then you have it, and so do I.” (Actually, Hilarion Henares said basically the same thing when he criticized the Philippines’ export policy almost a decade ago. He said, if I may recall, that the reason we lose in the international trade game is we confine our exports to something physical like bananas and sugar, while the Japanese and other advanced countries export technology. He pointed out that if we sell bananas, we lose the bananas; but if the Japanese sell technology, they don’t lose such knowhow!)

An article in Fortune magazine many issues ago compared the cost of producing a Ford automobile prototype and a Microsoft software — saying that the profit from software is far far heftier than that from a car. The book is illuminating: “Information can be expensive to create, but it is cheap to reproduce and distribute.” The errors of Xerox and Apple are also discussed here, principally for basing their business models “on the illusion that the value was in the hardware rather than the software.”

Five more lessons from nature are offered by the book — from creating a whole new way to profit to inventing an entirely new economy consistent with the ways of nature; from creating diversity of products to knowing the “four seasons of business” — namely innovation, growth, improvement and release. The book recommends that we must also be sensitive to signals when a certain enterprise is at its death’s throes and must, therefore, “release.” Because, they are quick to add, release will be followed by a “rebirth.”

Are these authors offering unrealistic policies, born of their rich imagination? Certainly not. Their observations are rooted in a study of the world’s 20 leading companies who have discovered that they could maximize their business performance “as they become like nature, a complex and dynamic living system.”

The assembly line was once the icon of the industrial age. We thought the microchip is the apt trademark of the information age. Read this book when it reaches the book stores — and you will conclude that the verdant, lush rainforest is the better icon for the first century. After all, we have already gone full circle. We are all going back to nature!