For use: Sunday, June 25, 2000 and thereafter

 

A Business Bestiary: "The Amoeba Organization"

by Michael Finley

Copyright (c) 2000 by Michael Finley

Tom Robbins dedicated his rollicking 1976 novel Even Cowgirls Get The Blues to, of all creatures, the amoeba.

His reasoning? Because amoebas replicate by splitting in half, then it stood to reason that the original amoeba, in some sense, is still out there. It had invented a kind of immortality.

Obviously, that is a fate we might like for our businesses -- assuming they are successful and we are enjoying them. But what is the commercial equivalent of amoeba immortality?

Let's think it through. An amoeba makes numerous passive "choices" when it fissions:

It chooses to stay small -- single-celled. Conceivably, a single cell be much larger than the typical amoeba. Where a two-celled human zygote makes the decision to grow and multiply cells at an exponential rate, the amoeba demurs. Humans require this growth to complete their complex destinies -- but amoebas took a less existential path, and that has made all the difference.

A diplodocus egg of the Pre-Cambrian era, for instance, weighed perhaps 30 pounds newly laid, yet was only a single cell. But one asks oneself, which are there more of today, doplodoci or amoebae? Small is beautiful.

The amoeba is humble. It occupies nonprime real estate such as pond scum and the human digestive tract. No corporate campus for the amoeba company. Locate where the action is, period.

It is utterly nonspecialized, having no mouth, no anus, and really no feet, unless you call pseudopodia feet -- which I don't.

Yet despite being nonspecialized in its parts, as an entity it pursues a very single specialized mission -- which for those of you unfortunate enough to experience amoebic dysentery, no explanation is necessary. It takes on no additional functions or product lines. It hedges no bets. It does not diversify. It neither merges nor acquires.

Are there amoeba businesses? Indeed there are. A single-person business is like a single-celled creature, interacting with the world without fully joining it. It remains deliberately small. But beware -- an amoeba is no jack of all trades, and a jack of all trades is no amoeba.

Can a multiple-person business be amoeboid? Yes. An organization can commit itself to one function and one mission -- a rock pit, a turkey ranch, even a dot-com specialty retailer (Widgets-N-the-Mail).

And there are advantages to doing this. Groups unable to communicate or maintain complex goals will embrace this approach. Get-back-to-basics enthusiasts will embrace the simplicity.

But it is hard to stem the natural inclination to evolution. You will want to sprout cilia, or a flagellum, and giddyup out of there.

The best use of the amoeba might be for what-if thinking. Ask your colleagues, "If we defined ourselves in absolute minimal terms -- what is our competence, what is our nucleus, our passion -- what would we say?"

Back to the egg, then -- and rethink yourself from scratch!