In this first instalment of this article, I am going to introduce you to one of the coolest fish families in the world, the Cichlids, a family made up of 1000s of brightly coloured little fish with just as many fascinating little quirks that make them ideally adapted to their own niche. My aim is to see if we can draw any parallels between the mechanisms of rapid speciation in the Cichlid fishes and the explosion of tech companies in the Silicon Valley and whether this has anything to teach us from a network strategic management point of view (or more usefully, from the point of view of a tech start-up).
Darwin argued that all individuals struggle to survive on limited resources, but that there is variation amongst the population that gives some individuals traits which confer a competitive advantage over those that do not possess such traits. Such individuals have higher evolutionary fitness and are thus more likely to survive to produce the next generation.
In their paper, Strategic Networks, Ranjay Gulati et al argue that ‘A key question in strategy research is why firms differ in their conduct and profitability’ and that the traditional view of firms as ‘atomistic actors competing for profits against each other in an impersonal market place is increasingly inadequate in a world in which firms are embedded in networks of social, professional, and exchange relationships with other organisational actors’ . They go on to contend that ‘the conduct and performance of firms can be more fully understood by examining the networks of relationships in which they are embedded‘.
It is easy to draw a parallel here between the ‘networks of relationships’ in which a firm is embedded and the ecosystem in which an organism spends its life. I propose that an evolutionary perspective can help explain the effect that the ecosystem within which a firm finds its self has on that firms conduct and likelihood of success. To do this I will draw parallels between explosive speciation of the African cichlid fishes and the explosion of high tech companies in Silicon Valley.
Silicon and the Cichlids
Three of the African great lakes, Malawi, Victoria and Tanganyika contain more species of fish than exist in any other lakes in the world. Lake Malawi is estimated to hold more than 1000 species of Cichlid fish. These 1000s of species appear to have evolved from one or two species within the last 12,000 years, which in evolutionary terms is a mere instant. The question thus becomes, what are the factors that have led to this explosive speciation and proliferation of fishes within a relatively geographically contained ecosystem?
It has been proposed that this rapid speciation occurred in three historical stages (see for example here, here & here), I will deal with each one in turn:
a) Major Habitat Diversification
b) Trophic Diversification (this is an adaptation to eat different kinds of food )
c) Sexual Selection
Now before we go any further, I suggest you watch this great presentation from Steve Blank which describes the Secret History of Silicon Valley. It is an hour long but I think it’s worth it and I will be glossing over some of the topics covered in my following exploration.
a) Major Habitat Diversification: location, location, location
The catalyst for the rapid speciation of Cichlids in the great lakes is said to be the range of habitats within the lakes that these fish were forced to adapt to. Whilst from a distance the lakes may look relatively uniform, within these lakes there are habitats ranging from dense rocky outcrops, to pleasant sandy shallows. As the population of fish within one of these particular habitats grew, they would be forced to venture into another habitat and those fish with mutations that helped them to survive in these habitats would be more likely to reproduce, often with other fish that similarly helpful mutations, eventually leading to a situation where the sand dwelling species can no longer interbreed with the rock dwelling species thus creating to distinct species.
Now, Steve Blank describes World War II as the catalyst for Silicon Valley’s explosion of tech companies. With the Allies constantly engaged in cat and mouse games against the Germans for technological superiority in their air raid and air defence campaigns. It was clearly these cat and mouse games that led to the rapid development of technology but since we are looking at this from a strategic network management point of view let’s not focus on the technology but rather on the actors involved.
In the U.S., the military and the secret services had to find a way to quickly develop new technologies to counteract Germany’s very efficient radar defence network. How did they do this? They started heavily funding university research labs. Now the Universities found themselves in a very unusual situation, they had literally been yanked out of their nice pleasant sandy bottomed research habitat and thrown into the rocky outcrop of the war. There was of course plenty of food (funding) available to them, but in order to be able take advantage of it, they had to have the genetic make-up (in terms of prior research expertise) that would allow them to quickly adapt to their new found habitat. So Harvard and MIT have this evolutionary capacity (or are seen to) whereas other universities do not. Here I am going to take some license and say that we now have two species of University; Harvard and MIT have had to adapt to a new habitat with the mandate to not only research but to also rapidly produce and disseminate new technologies whilst other universities are still residing in their sandy bottomed research habitat…
In the next section we will look at the evolutionary mechanisms that led to the rapid trophic variation in the Cichlid fish and how this was mirrored by the post-war explosion of privatised companies coming out of Silicon Valley.
