EconomicaNatura

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By Mark Lundegren

Recession or no recession? Improving economic conditions, or declining ones?

Answering these and similar questions, reliably and in advance, can be greatly aiding in our lives and personal decision-making. And this is no less true in the lives and decisions of entrepreneurs and their organizations.

Our perceptions of economic conditions, much as with social and technological trends, can mean the difference between successful choices and less successful ones. In our lives and families, examples include decisions about changing jobs and making major purchases. In enterprises, it spans decisions about starting new ventures, entering or exiting markets, and proceeding with or delaying innovations and investments.

My Big Box Economic Indicator, summarized in the graphic above, is a simple, direct, and often quite useful way to get a sense of current and likely future economic conditions, especially in local areas and markets. As outlined in the graphic, the model is based on our personal, on-the-ground survey of big box, big name, or other prominent stores, especially ones in cyclical and other leading or indicating markets. Overall, this survey and its companion predicting model seek to provide us with a clearer sense of immediate market and economic conditions, and in turn what this may tell us about future ones. Since the model works best for cyclical markets, stores focused on staple or essential goods, including supermarkets, typically are not good candidates for the approach.

In keeping with the graphic, this self-led method and real-time model work by having us examine and categorize the relative amounts of customers and employees on one or more store floors – in all cases, compared with one another and also normal or average conditions. This information then is taken as an informal predictor, gauge, or indicator of likely economic conditions in the near-term. The approach doubtless is imperfect and also may be locally-biased, but it is remarkably quick and easy, literally can be used while we shop or run errands, encourages the broadly-aiding practice of direct and attentive observation, and may provide us with important perspective to aid economic decisions, large and small.

In the model, more employees relative to customers than is the norm, or fewer customers per employee than is typical – especially across repeated and varying store visits – is viewed as cause for recessionary concern. Conversely, more customers and fewer employees than is ordinary is taken as an early signal of economic rebound or turnaround. Notably, this may be more so than wide decreases or increases in prices, which is another useful economic indicator, but also one that may lag changes in store customer and staffing levels by weeks or months.

Today, there of course are many and far more formal indicators of current and future economic conditions, ones that similarly might aid our decision-making and sense of the economics, or socioeconomics, around us. But as highlighted in the graphic, these measures are often retrospective, delayed, aggregated across large markets and wide geographies, and perhaps marked by information gaps in areas of interest to us.

Given this, I would encourage you to experiment with my Big Box Economic Indicator, especially as a supplement to following more formal economic data, and as always, welcome your thoughts and comments.

Mark Lundegren is the founder of EconomicaNatura.

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By Mark Lundegren

Hearing that I am involved in organizational strategy and consulting, people often informally ask my opinion about a business, product, or service idea they or their company have in mind. I don’t mind this at all, since I enjoy learning about new ideas and innovations.

However, rarely do I offer a firm view on these ideas, since I am unlikely to have enough information to do so confidently in brief conversation. Instead, I more commonly ask and listen to the person’s often revealing response to the following two-part question: who are your planned clients, and what are the costs and benefits to them relative to their options today? More than once, this question has led others to think more deeply about their idea, the market space or landscape it would occupy, how the offering might fare against current and alterative offerings, and its needed essential features.

As my title suggests, the question appears aiding to people because it reliably drives greater probing and appreciation of the particulars of client value creation. With this term, I mean the natural or inevitable offering of specific benefits to one or more clients, at a cost and in one or more settings, that is part of all innovation and entrepreneurship. In practice, assessments of client value can be enormously important and powerful, and indeed even decisive for ventures and initiatives, large and small. Given this, I want to spend a few minutes outlining a simple model for understanding and approaching the topic of client value, and in turn for successful and self-sustaining endeavors of all kinds.

The Understanding Client Value infographic above begins with and emphasizes four crucial ideas for organizational or entrepreneurial success: 1) adequate and often progressive value creation – and thus sufficient ability and opportunity – are at the foundation of successful and enduring enterprises or endeavors of all kinds, 2) value is always in the eyes or experience of one or more clients, 3) value is well or helpfully understood in terms of client costs and benefits, whether real or imagined, and 4) offerings normally must be not only comparatively and compellingly valuable to a client, but also providable in ways that are both sustainable and improvable in time by a provider. Take away any of these ideas or features, and offerings and ventures of all kinds can be expected to fail or struggle. By contrast, the integrated and successful use of these concepts all but guarantees success, if always in degrees and given the particulars surrounding the initiative or venture.

Using these core ideas, my client value infographic goes on to encourage express identification of potential clients and at least a preliminary inventory of likely client costs and benefits – both in absolute terms and compared with current or waiting alternatives – when considering any initiative or endeavor. To use a simple but illustrative example, applicable from food carts and professional services to software applications and industrial technology, if a client must spend five units of a currency and take five minutes to use a product or service that almost immediately saves them ten units of currency and ten minutes of time, or perhaps instead provides ten units of benefit and takes no time (all relative to current conditions or offerings), the product or service would appear to offer substantial value, knowing nothing else about it.

As highlighted in the left portion of the infographic, client value assessments can and normally should be formatted, measured, and then used to drive value innovation either more simply in terms of net benefit (client benefits minus costs) or more subtly via the benefit-to-cost ratio (client benefits divided by costs – which notably allows easier comparison of different offerings or options with varying cost or price levels). In the right of the infographic, I have included lists of common categories of client costs and benefits to help you make both preliminary and increasingly complete or sophisticated assessments of current and potential client value.

In the bottom of the graphic, I make the fairly straightforward observations first that clients aidingly can be involved in value (cost and benefit) inventories, and second that sales or usage – and also favorability or enthusiasm ratings – are likely to track closely with value creation overall. Following on this last idea, but less plainly, the section also notes that aggregate sales, utilization, or favorability rates in themselves often provide only limited information on the specific areas of client cost and benefit driving use or purchase. This observation again recommends adequate probing and cataloging of these essential client features, and once more as an aid or prelude to progressive and sustainable client value creation over time.

Let me end this brief but important discussion of understanding client value by encouraging you to explore and use these ideas in theory and practice. As with the potential entrepreneurs and innovators that I meet informally, you quickly may realize considerable benefits by using this approach, and notably with only modest costs. In particular, you are likely to find that this set of ideas and model for offering or initiative analysis reliably gives you far better focus on current and prospective clients, their immediate circumstances and options, and your opportunities to provide new and then increasing value to them.

As always, I am happy to respond to your comments and questions in this often critical area for career, entrepreneurial, organizational, and leadership success.

Mark Lundegren is the founder of EconomicaNatura.

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By Mark Lundegren

In the life of every person or organization seeking to have an enduring impact, there is a regular need to look at and assess our place or point in time – and especially to see the natural windows of opportunity that time continually opens and closes for us all.

Unfortunately, many of us chronically look at time and its trends in a linear, straight-line, incremental, or piecemeal way, assuming that the future will be a little more or less like the present. In theory and practice, this rarely is the case. Instead, significant trends in time and thus opportunities to create value in the world tend to unfold in exponential, curving, leaping, or building ways, with conditions often becoming very different over time.

To better understand both that and why this is so, we can consider valuable innovations, large and small, from the past. These include the rise of technologies such as trains and planes, novel household products, new retailers and restaurants, popular music or drama, and even humorous internet memes. In each case, if you trace adoption or proliferation of the innovation, you likely will discover that it began somewhat modestly and owing to considerable effort, eventually grew rapidly or exponentially, and then became a more stable or typical condition or phenomenon – and perhaps before being displaced or marginalized by a still newer innovation. When probing innovations in this way, you also may find that a fairly small number of key factors – economic, technological, social, psychological- combined first to enable or allow the innovation and later to promote or usher its eventual obsolescence.

The Exponential Imperative infographic above summarizes these ideas and describes the typical trendlines or curving nature of innovative change. Overall, the graphic is intended to help you: 1) better sense when past innovations are becoming worn or less valuable, 2) consider the corresponding potential for and identify new value-creating opportunities, and 3) lead the essential entrepreneurial processes of opportunity identification or location, successive or serial innovation, and progressive or compounding value creation in time.

Perhaps the most crucial idea and element in the graphic is the s-shaped, sigmoid, or logistic curve (labeled #1). This model of trends in time emphasizes that innovative or displacing change – whether in nature, society, or other complex systems – occurs as I described above: figuratively beginning with a trickle, surging to a torrent, and eventually flattening to a more placid or lake-like state. Importantly, this model of environmental change has been extensively studied and validated (for example, see Growth and also Modis), and I have little doubt that you readily can find examples of these dynamics at work around you.

As suggested, this general shape of change can occur not only with specific iterations of technologies or product offerings, but equally with the larger trends and enabling enterprises that contain and facilitate these specific iterations or successions. Thus, a movie production company may promote several admired actors whose careers each have one or more logistic or sigmoid trendlines, while the company itself and its larger industry may be subject to a similar, if more elongated, life cycle or trajectory over time.

This simple but important model of innovative or upending natural change has at least four key lessons for anyone seeking to begin or sustain an organization, endeavor, or cause. First, it suggests the need for and desirability of value-elevating or incumbent-displacing innovation in all new ventures, products, processes, and offerings. Second, it counsels a degree of patience or resilience when developing new modes of value, since they may take time either to develop in mature form or become recognized as valuable. Third, and conversely, the idea underscores that value-increasing innovations (and not merely novel ones) should achieve dramatic growth or adoption in a reasonable period of time, or should be re-worked or abandoned if this is not the case. Fourth, the idea of s-shaped or logistic innovation curves, or life cycles, underscores the need for innovators, entrepreneurs, and organizations in all domains to regularly look for and act on signs of commodification, obsolescence, maturation, and diminishing value (whether in their work or that of others).

This last idea is the focus of the second and third elements in my graphic. In the process of successive innovation (labeled #2), maturing but still viable products, offerings, efforts, or processes are used to fund and promote new innovations, whether within or beyond existing areas of effort. In this way, there is conscious and strategic disinvestment in or leaning of mature or established operations or functioning, with freed resources used to test and build out higher value and thus naturally more promising offerings for the future.

Within a particular career or organization, there of course may be multiple efforts or value creation processes underway in various states of both maturity and overall success. But overall, the model suggests an ongoing natural or inevitable need to use or leverage the economics and learnings of mature endeavors to enable new and progressively more valuable ones. The model equally underscores that, elementally, there are only two core personal and organizational strategies available to us – that of pursuing valuable new innovations, and then the subsequent and leveraging making of efficiency improvements to existing innovations, especially with their natural maturation and mastery.

The third element on the graphic (labeled #3) extends this set of ideas to emphasize the natural need and opportunity not only to successively or iteratively innovate in one or more domains, but to do so compoundingly or exponentially. By this, I mean the pursuit and realization of accelerating, compoundings, or upwardly curving, and not simply steadily increasing or additive, levels of value creation in time. Crucially, this third graphical element at once describes the natural landscape that existing organizations must traverse when seeking to innovate progressively and endure in time, and also which new entrepreneurs or groups face when attempting to enter existing value processes, domains, or ecosystems.

As I said at the start of our discussion, many of us look at the world and trends in time incrementally or linearly, and perhaps naturally so. Importantly, this is true not only of people at large, but also professional analysts, planners, organizational leaders, and their regulators. This idea explains why and predicts that many of us often will be wrong, and even widely wrong, in our forecasts and expectations for the future – including those pertaining to product, technological, economic, and social trends, all of which normally and often unintuitively are exponential in their basic nature.

In a frequently decisive sense, and as my infographic highlights, any dynamic natural phenomenon that appears trending in a linear fashion probably is being observed too narrowly or closely in scope or time. Nearly always, examples or cases of linear change typically and insightfully can be recast as part of the early nose, middle body, or eventual tail of one or more larger exponential or curving trends.

As always, I am happy to respond to your comments and questions on this often crucial topic for personal, enterprise, and societal success.

Mark Lundegren is the founder of EconomicaNatura.

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By Mark Lundegren

As with adventurous life generally, entrepreneurship is real work. There are 1001 topics and details to master, strong demands on our time and the time of others, and frequent risk and stress. But all of this is naturally multiplied, and our work may be threatened overall, when our plans and expectations prove incorrect or impractical – and thus, when we must not only work, but redouble our efforts or even start again.

For this reason, identifying high-quality natural opportunities, whether for our careers or organizations, is an essential skill or ability, and a crucial early and periodic step in any effort, large or small. In fact, understanding initial and ongoing opportunity quality is not only a core evaluation in natural endeavor, human or otherwise, it is commonly the primary difference between failure, mere viability, and true success or impact.

Fortunately, superior opportunities normally share common characteristics, and this is true across both living nature and modern work and enterprise. While I won’t say that identifying high-quality opportunities is easy, it is not an overwhelming or unmanageable task. In fact, it can be a game-like process – challenging but also enjoyable.

This is in large part because we naturally have been identifying opportunities for as long as there have been people, and indeed long before. Given this, we are well-evolved for this work overall, and normally have a good intuition for welcoming opportunities – once we understand what to look for (and notably, just as in hunting and gathering). In any case, finding and pursuing high-quality natural opportunities is typically less work, and more rewarding, than seeking to seize, hold, or labor amid poorly selected or low-quality ones.

The Finding Natural Opportunities infographic above provides a useful model to demystify and accelerate the process of identifying high-quality opportunities. The approach can be applied at all levels of life and work, in nearly any domain, and to both endeavors planned and underway, reflecting its natural origins and broad utility. And while this five-step process is work and results are not guaranteed, there is good reason to believe the approach is apt to greatly aid in our identification, pursuit, and management of opportunities of all kinds.

Though the infographic is fairly straightforward and intuitive, let me elaborate on it briefly, by summarizing and discussing each of the model’s five steps or considerations:

1.  Underserved or Untapped Area – the infographic begins with the idea that all good opportunities involve recognition of an area – or an existing or waiting process – that is significantly overlooked, untapped, underdeveloped, or underserved in some way relative to its potential. When this occurs, a meaningful natural opening is identified, where we might impactfully create, add, or increase value (with value understandable as benefit to someone or something, especially either net of or divided by costs). While this proposal may seem, and indeed is, a straightforward concept, it is important to note that many modern people and organizations do not use or leverage this basic idea and natural principle. Instead, we may work or focus on, and thus become enmeshed in, serving or maintaining status quo conditions, rather than the naturally more productive and rewarding work of finding and pursuing new openings to create or increase value.

2.  Ability or Capability – the second key idea and process step in the graphic is the need to assess our ability or capability against potential openings, or our identified opportunities to increase value. The reasoning at work here is equally straightforward. Simply put, if we do not have significant current or potential ability to pursue or act valuably within the opening, it is probably not a good natural opportunity for us. However novel or well-intentioned our approach, we are apt to perform poorly in the area, and through the signalling effects of our efforts, invite competitors who have superior capability. Instead, we normally should continue to look for openings better suited to our abilities and resources. This may involve better clarifying our core capabilities or strengths, looking for opportunities in new areas or at different scales of effort (whether narrower or broader), or all of these things. And on this point, let me again emphasize that openings can involve wholly new endeavors or improvements to existing ones.

3.  Motivation or Alignment – once you or your organization have identified one or more openings that are well-matched to your current or potential ability or capability, a third critical test and process step is gauging your motivation toward or alignment with the opportunity. Always, various actionable openings will have varying personal appeal or alignment with an organization’s mission (its core values and primary ambitions). Without strong motivation or alignment, it normally is best to pursue other opportunities. As with ability, this is because our performance or value delivery is likely to be weaker over time, especially against more driven competitors that are almost sure to find their way to any significant opportunity, once identified and acted upon.

4.  Sustainability – with a strong or significant opening, for which we or our organizations are well-suited in ability and spirit, a fourth step and consideration is an assessment of whether our plans to pursue the opening are or can be made sustainable. With this term, I mean acting in ways that are relatively surefooted, certain, durable, and repeatable – and thus free of risky or fragile assumptions, steps, or resources. Sometimes, otherwise significant opportunities cannot be pursued in a sustainable way, and might be abandoned for this reason alone. However, perhaps in as many or more cases, added creativity and problem-solving can identify a sustainable approach (or opening) to pursue the opportunity, and this generally should be our default or initial action whenever facing risky or doubtful plans.

5.  Progressivity – for an opportunity that passes these first four steps, or that has all of these first four qualities, it is essential to add a crucial fifth step and consideration. This is our ability to pursue the opening in time. Life and the world are rarely static or unchanging, and identified openings can mature, evolve, or even close. In particular, and as I have emphasized, openings can become filled by others or other organizations, requiring us to increase value or identify new openings in new or existing areas. For these reasons, it is essential that our plans to pursue and work within an opportunity are progressive. With this term, I mean cognizant that any opening and its larger environment are likely to change over time, through our actions or those of others, or more unexpectedly or independently. As such, our plans should include strong ideas not only about our initial or current actions, but also how we might either steadily increase value in the future, or ably, spiritedly, and durably adapt to new openings.

This five-step model and process for finding natural opportunities can greatly aid your actions in many areas of modern life and work. Inspired by natural evolutionary functioning, the approach may be far more powerful than a number of traditional methods for evaluating new ventures, products, and strategies.

As noted in the graphic, the approach also can be used to evaluate and score both potential and existing actions, operations, markets, and clients. This is because each should similarly and naturally have all five of these qualities, if they are true opportunities for natural growth, vibrant value creation, and enriching impact – and not merely paths of naturally commoditizing, marginalizing, or limiting immersion in the status quo.

When giving either new or existing opportunities a 0-5 score, you might consider dropping or rethinking any endeavor that is not at least a four. You might also plot or sort opportunities by both their scores and likely impact or size, so that you get a fuller or more holistic sense of both the quality and quantity of each opportunity.

Feel free to write to me with any questions you have on the model and its use.

Mark Lundegren is the founder of EconomicaNatura.

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By Mark Lundegren

Are you more of an economist than an ecologist, or the reverse?

In truth, the two disciplines have many common features, and economists and ecologists alike can learn a great deal from one another. And though this proposal may be uncommon, it really shouldn’t be a surprise.

After all, each field involves the study of resources. This includes their creation or acquisition, their transmission and synthesis, their obsolescence, and their combined and often evolving effects. Owing to this, we well might think of human economics as material ecology, and ecology as natural economics.

Ecology And Economics Clearly Converge In Human Food Systems, But This Is Only A Beginning

To make this point clearer, and perhaps more actionable and aiding to your efforts, I would like to spend a few minutes showing how several core principles of ecology apply or correspond to those of economics. This is both at a holistic or macroeconomic level and at the level of organizations and entrepreneurs, or microeconomically. And though I won’t pursue a reverse analysis here, I would encourage this and believe you will find that many central ideas in economics find an analogous, instructive, and aiding place in the field of ecology as well.

As you may know, ecology is a scientific field within biology that studies the interactions of organisms with one another and their larger environment. This includes effects between species, ones on and by overall ecosystems, and ones owing to both living and non-living factors. Much as with economics, or the study of human material production, ecology frequently concerns itself with organization and structure, diversity and innovation, population dynamics and migration, cooperation and competition, interaction and behavior more generally, and maturation and obsolescence. Like economics, ecology also often pays special attention to – and may seek to aid or restore – resource production and cycling, niche construction, and the movement of energy (or value) through systems and subsystems (on all these points, see Wikipedia Ecology).

I will leave you to consider these introductory ideas, but trust they make a strong case there are important similarities between the two disciplines – and ones, I would add, that are often overlooked and thus a waiting source of new or improved insights in both directions. For the remainder of our discussion, I will show how specific ideas from ecology find not only an analogous place in economics, but also in ways that might benefit the modern entrepreneur and economic enterprise.

Here are 15 topics from the field of ecology with important lessons – some propelling, others more cautionary – for modern economics and innovation (to explore these topics, again see Wikipedia Ecology):

1. Hierarchy – this is the idea that all of nature is structure, or rather a series of structures at different scales, and thus a hierarchical or nested framework of natural activities and processes. Nature’s hierarchical structure ranges from those at the level of genes and organisms all the way to large ecosystems and whole biospheres. A crucial takeaway for modern economics is that this idea not only applies to human productive systems, but that people and organizations are wise to have an adequate model of how immediate and larger market systems are structured and function, including locating our current and potential place within them.

2. Biodiversity – diversity is a common and normally health-increasing or resilience-aiding feature of life and ecological systems, and once again at many levels. This seems an essential lesson for both organizations and larger economies, highlighting natural perils in narrow or inflexible products and sources of value, supply and distribution chains, culture and thinking, and operations or processes, all to begin a list.

3. Habitat – related to hierarchy, habitat is the specific setting or settings in which organisms and species live, with important parallels to the idea of customer segments or markets in economics. In both cases, crucial points of consideration are the setting’s breadth or size, vibrancy or rate of change, relative openness to new entrants, and likely stability or risk of collapse in time. As such, all firms and innovators should be clear on the size and dynamics of their current and most likely future markets, or economic habitats.

4. Niche – this is the specific place and manner in which species function in their habitats, which usefully can be thought of as operating either as focused specialists or more ranging (and often longer-lived, but more effortful) generalists, with determinations always begging questions of the scale or level of analysis. Again, organizations and entrepreneurs are wise to be clear on their locational and functional niche(s), and the natural opportunities and limitations each naturally affords.

5. Niche construction – crucially, organisms and species do not only dwell in niches within larger habitats, they actively create and construct their niches, and also evolve them over time and with the demands of adaptive change. The essential lesson for people and organizations is the need to proactively construct and continually improve their niches, and especially not to accept existing habitat or market conditions and niches or operational practices as given, inviolable, or unimprovable.

6. Biomes & Biospheres – these terms refer to ecosystems at the regional and planetary levels. Key lessons for entrepreneurs and their organizations are that while species and organisms may be primarily concerned and affected by their immediate habitats and niches, they are never fully isolated from larger forces and processes. Notably, this includes both threats of extinction and opportunities for expansion or transformation, each waiting beyond well-known horizons.

7. Population ecology – population dynamics are a complex topic, but an important takeaway from its study is that habitats and niches almost inevitably will become filled relative to available resources. For naturally health-seeking enterprises and innovators, there are at least two important lessons. One is that high growth conditions can be expected to eventually reach saturation or commoditization, and thus growing demands for either new efficiency or novelty. The other is that, amid saturation, a third option is possible – the identification and construction of new and more open niches. Often, as in natural life, these will be adjacent to existing operations, whether in terms of client type, organizational capabilities, or both.

8. Metapopulations & migration – these concepts are used describe the ecological phenomenon of species re-populating diminished or untenable and thus formerly abandoned or avoided local habitats and niches, as conditions improve or constraints are removed. An essential lesson for economic life here is that products, clients, segments, or regions may be in disfavor or unserviceable today, but this is subject to change. As such, firms are wise not to burn bridges as they exit, avoid, or are unable to access product lines, segments, and relationships.

9. Community ecology – a term delineating the interaction of different species and their niches within a habitat or local area. While co-located species sometime operate in parallel and without appreciable interaction, scientists routinely find value-adding interactions, in fact or waiting, between many species, even quite dissimilar ones. The economic analog of this is the importance of local networking, community involvement and pursuit of easy synergies, and expectations of untapped value around any person or organization.

10. Ecosystem ecology – this is community ecology on a wider or larger scale. While there may be similarities to community ecology in basic process, often the opportunities for more systemwide networking and synergy are different. For example, extra-local networking may be more difficult, resource-intensive, time-consuming, or otherwise demanding, and require both greater capacity and effort overall. However, and again as with natural life, these efforts also may hold far more significant and transformative opportunities too.

11. Food webs or chains – these are models that describe the lesser and greater movement of resources – from sunlight to derived foods – through organisms, niches, habitats, ecosystems, biomes, and overall biospheres. The corresponding concept in economics is that of value chains, which describe either the firm-level or aggregated movements of raw materials into final finished products. In natural life and modern economics, awareness of our current and potential food webs or value chains of course can be enormously beneficial, especially if we and our groups are either survival or growth-oriented.

12. Trophic levels – the various layers or strata in food webs or chains, with each ascending layer principally feeding on organisms below their level. As with population dynamics, this is another complex area of ecology, but one that offers an important lesson for individuals, organizations, and even whole economies. This is the naturally increasing material dependency and potential for volatility that accompanies higher vertical levels in the resource webs or value chains that form human economies. In each case, both species and enterprises can become distanced from essential, and often overlooked or unseen, natural resources. A core takeaway here for entrepreneurs is a full and careful understanding of essential supply chains and their inevitable risks.

13. Keystone species – these normally are the top predator species in a habitat or ecosystem, ones that naturally feed and depend on, and in turn often healthfully regulate, apportion, and organize species in lower trophic levels – and thus, as the name implies, often control, order, and stabilize habitats and ecosystems overall. Notably, removal of keystone species is often disastrous for habitats and ecosystems, and the natural diminution of keystones usually is a sign of larger stressors in an environment. In addition to awareness of economic hierarchies and value chains, a key lesson here is the importance of understanding the keystone firms in relevant industries and larger economic systems, since these naturally will influence or organize, and often constrain or define, lesser organizations and their opportunities. And as in natural systems, they will often signal the overall health of their industry or sector.

14. Holism – this important or keystone principle of ecology is the importance of appreciating the profound complexity and often vast synergy of evolved ecological systems. Whether for ecologists or entrepreneurs the lesson is the same – use simplified models of life and work at your peril. While these may be useful in the short-term, they inevitably will be incomplete and their overreliance is likely to lead to unwelcome surprise in time.

15. Sustainability – the final lesson of ecology for economics I will highlight is that of natural sustainability, or the need for evolving species and ecosystems to act and adapt in ways that can endure. Of course, some economic ventures are short-term by design and thus less constrained in this regard. But most enterprises, and certainly most modern economies, will want to ensure ecological sustainability, economic sustainability, and of course social or client sustainability too.

Whatever your area of effort and focus, I would encourage you to consider these interesting and often important ecological lessons for modern economic and entrepreneurial life, and welcome your comments and questions. In the least, the comparison can and should remind us that economic activity, or economics, always occurs in the larger context or system that is nature, and as such, is ultimately ecological activity, or ecologics.

Mark Lundegren is the founder of EconomicaNatura.