Evolution is Everywhere

Evolution is one of my great interests. I've noticed lately how evolution is implied in so much, and well beyond biology. It is found in social environments, and in business. It is possibly everywhere. Today's link shows how the same ecological process, operating in opposite directions, can be found in fiction and in non-fiction.

I'm currently reading The Long Tail by Chris Anderson, editor of Wired. The title refers to the huge number of products that sell rarely if at all. However, the internet economy has now made these items viable products. The business opportunities represented by these goods are collectively comparable to the few 'hits' at the 'head' of the distribution. (See the figure, below, from www.thelongtail.com, Anderson's website.) At one point in the book, Anderson describes these goods in ecological terms. It's as if the top-selling products were always there as islands that show above the water line. Now the ocean is receding, and revealing all those other items that are now available. I read this as saying that many niches are now viable business opportunities.

What about the opposite situation? In the novel Galapagos, Kurt Vonnegut describes what happens when a group of tourists are stranded on an island while the rest of the human race contracts a mysterious disease that prevents them from reproducing. In technical terms, the genetic pool is dramatically bottlenecked. Vonnegut mashes up time and space and life and death and ghosts in his usual hilarious format, and describes how an accident saves the human race, but leads to an unusual evolutionary twist.

Geek MBA

I just got some news that saddened my geeky soul. Gary Gygax, the creator of the role-playing game Dungeons and Dragons, passed away this past week (NY Times Obituary). While it's been years since I've played, there's definitely still a soft spot in me for one of the great pasttimes of my geeky adolescence.

In that spirit, I'd like to make a connection that was really surprising to me when it first came up (but is perhaps obvious in hindsight). With the rising popularity of massive, multiuser online games such as World of Warcraft, it was perhaps inevitable that the skills developed by gaming would be analyzed in some depth. The surprising thing is that some or many of these skills are now thought to be useful in the business world.

The Harvard Business Review ran a list in the February 2008 issue of the Breakthrough Ideas for 2008. Among this list were articles entitled, 'The Gamer Disposition' and, 'Making Alternate Reality the New Business Reality.' (Here's the complete list.) So it was basically a surprise that geeky gaming has gone mainstream and is now considered conducive to good business. (And here's a further discussion.) On top of all this, a recent NY Times Op-Ed discussed how role-playing games help people to understand each other. I didn't think I got any of that from D&D.

Here's to D&D, and to Gary Gygax. It's amazing how it's gone from a sure sign of Satan worship to indicative of business competency.