Rat – the best management teacher for modern corporate

Know to ‘use and be useful’ to others in the ecosystem is the strong management message, the rats convey to the corporate world in particular. Among the different species of rodents, rats over score all other animals in the group such as Porcupine, Capybara, Beavers, Squirrels etc., in the population size.

Why and how rats alone could take such great advantage of the situation and become ‘omnipresent’ and abundant in their population size when compared to other rodents?

The porcupine has strong spines (quills) for their defense. Even the lion and tiger may not easily dare to go near a porcupine. With such powerful defense weapons, the porcupines are expected to be more in numbers than rats. On the other hands, squirrels are very smart, agile and fast runners and climbers of trees. But they are also not so dominant in their population size when compared to rats.

The discrepancy and anomaly in the abundance and prevalence of rats over other rodents conveys a strong management message that every corporate must learn. The success depends upon three fundamental factors such as

1. Strength/power to prove and win over competition
2. Smartness in using the opportunity
3. Be useful to others in the ecosystem

Porcupine falls under the first category. Indeed, it has strong spines (quills) for its defense. But it appears that the animal perhaps would have over dependent on the spines and hence would not have developed the other two qualities. Strength alone help none to achieve anything is what the porcupines conveys to the corporate world.

Whereas, the rats perfected to be an ‘opportunist’, learned the art of using the opportunity in the best way possible and become even a co-habitant with man himself. Can it be possible for any animal to be so successful only because it has just learned the art of using the opportunity?

Besides that, rats have learned to use the opportunity and also become very useful to many other animals in the ecosystem. Rats are the main food of cats, foxes, snakes, wide variety of birds like eagle, owl etc., in the ecosystem. If the population of rats decline, necessarily it will have serious impact on the population of those rat eating animals as well.

In brief, rats have become one of the important elements of balancing the food chain in the ecosystem. The nature has favoured rats with short gestation period, larger litter size etc., whereas such favours are not there with porcupines. The gestation period of porcupines is 210 days as against 21-24 days gestation period of rats.

Corporate and its employees must get their management message right and straight from rats. They are

1. One should not relay too much on ones knowledge, experience or the might
2. One must constantly update the knowledge to ‘learn and use’ the opportunity
3. One should be ‘useful’ to others in every possible way in the corporate ecosystem

If the above message is not derived well by the corporate, inadvertently they may dig their own graveyard.

Nature has created such variety and diversity in flora and fauna not for the man to just destroy and eat but to learn as well. Hence the corporate must invest its time to learn from nature to become successful ‘organically’ and ‘commercially’.

Dr S Ranganathan, ClinRise Derma Pvt., Ltd., Chennai