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
