6 Action Rules for Business Executives

• Use the best business genes available

Business genes are basic units of economic information, intangible ideas of value that can be replicated to create yet more value. These are what ultimately drives improvement. Business genes are created and used by individuals and teams; but once created, the business genes have a life of their own. They seek to incorporate themselves into as many vehicles as possible in order to spread themselves widely. The vehicles fall into two categories: machine-like objects; and self-organizing systems, including individual executives, teams, and organizations. The vehicles produce products and services, which themselves thereby also incorporate business genes.

Fundamental value does not reside in products and services, nor yet in the vehicles that produce them--corporations and the physical things that they own--but in the ideas, formulae and technologies that drive the vehicles.

There are three ways to deploy business genes. One is to create them from scratch: invent a new product or service, or a new business system. This is a rare event, and few of us have the originality required. A second way is to appropriate and use successful business genes. Remember, the genes want to multiply, so they are amenable to being used. But to do this successfully you may need to get there ahead of other pople who might have the same idea. For instance, Raymond Ackerman, who created the Pick 'n Pay supermarket giant in South Africa, used the idea -the business gene-of self-service supermarkets after it was already well established in the US but before it had become so in Africa. A third way is to take an already successful business gene and modify it slightly: create a new variant of the business gene.

• Make yourself an excellent vehicle for successful busines genes

The best business genes will always seek out the best vehicles, and if a better vehicle becomes available, the business gene will drive that vehicle, vleaving the earlier vehicle stalled.

To use successful genes, you must further their purpose and help them multiply. This requires adaptation on your part. Adaptation requires exposure to competition. Dont' seek to insulate yourself from internal or external career competition; if you do, you'll stop developing. Compete in the major markets, not in the backwaters. Beware of working in corporate pyramids, which insulate executives, especially senior ones.

• Use the best vehicles available and drive them

You are a user of economic information, you are the skills that you have, including the skill to collaborate with successful business genes and other vehicles for them: with other individuals, with teams, and with organizations. You are the value added. You are the driving force. The team or company you join, the other resources you commandeer, are vehicles for you. The vehicles are there to advance your purpose, to provide protection, to incarnate your energy. Remember that the vehicles are just that, and the only reason to work through one is if it is the best possible vehicle around for your purposes. Continually ask yourself: Am I driving or being driven? Am I driving the right vehicle? Is there anywhere else I could add more value?

• Career evolution requires variation: a series of new jobs (whether or not you change firms) and new ways of doing the existing job.

Start a project. Take on a new responsibility. Change the furniture. Identify new business genes that can provide you with fresh direction and for which you can be the best vehicle; business genes that are unexploited, because the appropriate vehicles for them have not yet been created. Genes need vehicles; they can identify the best available, but cannot necessarily create the vehicles themselves--and in business, this results in opportunities for individuals to create appropriate vehicles. Value can also be created by combining business genes in new permutations, and providing new vehicles for the new mix of genes.

• Evolution requires coninual experimentation and improvement

If you don't produce a new-generation version of yourself as quickly as your career competitors do, you'll fall behind. Experimentation and improvement require fresh combinations of new business genes -new skills, new ideas, new ways of working. Remember that your success requires you to be a vehicle for excellent combinations of business genes, and to work within or alongside other successful vehicles, so experiment all the time with new combinations of genes and vehicles.

• Evolution requires failure

The greatest and most abundant freedom that the universe offers is the freedom to fail. For most organisms this means an early death, and it is the species that benefits. Fortunately, in careers we always get another chance. But constructive mutation in your character and skills requires failure, as well as the maturity to recognize and accept this. Don't let your ego deny the fact of failure; this is another form of competitive insulation. Accepting failure and using self-development processes to benefit from it can free you to compete. Failure is easier to accept and to reverse in the context of business gene theory. It results from being a good vehicle for poor business genes, or from being a poor vehicle for good business genes. Identify which is the case, and take appropriate corrective action.

ACTION IMPLICATIONS

1. Identify business genes that are underexploited and that are having to make do with poor vehicles. Create the best new vehicles for existing powerful business genes--for valuable economic information, ways of working, and technologies.
2. Join existing successful business genes into new combinations, and provide appropriate vehicles for the new combinations.
3. Make yourself the best vehicle for a winning and unique combination of business genes.
4. If you participate in running an organization, realize that its value derives from being a vehicle for successful business genes. Ensure that the organization is and remains the best vehicle for the genes. See that the organization's gene pool is continually replenished with new inputs that have already proven their success.
5. Create spin-offs and spin-outs from existing organizations.

This is a text compilation from extracts of Richard Koch's book "The 80/20 Principle and 92 other powerful laws of nature. The science of Success."