Interlude - Index of

158 | Grown-Up Company
You might conclude that seagulls are stupid, which is true,
but it misses the point. In their natural environment, with no
sadistic ornithologists, the gulls’ simple rules work perfectly:
sharp-equals-stone and speckled-equals-egg. Remember, birds
fly, so the lighter their brains the better. Why carry extra baggage?
Absent meddling scientists, these simple rules may be
the best possible design.
What does this have to do with business or human behavior?
People also have instinctive behaviors, but unlike gulls, we
no longer live in our natural environment. During most of our
evolutionary history, humans lived in small nomadic bands with
just a few dozen members; the most advanced technology was
hide tents and flint arrowheads. No wonder we see so much
speckled-egg behavior—behavior that seems meaningless and
futile—in modern corporations that equip employees with
BlackBerrys and Web browsers and pack thousands of them
into small cubicles.
People get frustrated with the limitations of humans in
a way that they don’t with physical objects. Someone who is
building a bridge will ask: How wide is the river? What materials
can I build with, and how heavy or strong are they? Bridge
builders don’t complain that the river should be narrower or
that cotton candy should have more tensile strength so they
could build with that. They deal with the physical reality.
But with people, we often expect perfection. We get angry
that people aren’t more rational, or more persistent, or more
empathetic, or—whatever. If you are building a company, you
have to deal with how people actually are. People are not perfect
little cogs that you can bolt into place. Our human brains