I feel sorry for the polar bears, and I'm not being callous when I tell you that if polar bears could hire consultants and take their advice, they wouldn't have to starve and become casualties of global climate change.
Yes, I understand that polar bears feed almost exclusively on the marine life they catch from their floating hunting blinds that melt earlier and freeze later each season. If you're like me, you've seen TV shows about "nuisance" polar bears hanging around Hudson Bay's small city of Churchill, waiting for their floating dinner tables to return so they can dine on seals.
Have you ever wondered why polar bears need ice? Have you ever wondered why some of them don't survive by hunting on land like their kissing cousins, the grizzlies? Theoretically, they could. Because they are white instead of brown, it's easy to forget that polar bears are so genetically similar to grizzlies that they have been known to mate with grizzles, producing a weird-looking, light brown offspring. Like grizzlies, polar bears are equipped with more than enough cunning, intelligence, muscle, claws, teeth and running speed to successfully hunt down and kill land animals, so why don't some of them abandon the increasingly unreliable sea ice and go shopping on land like the grizzlies?
The answer is that polar bears keep relying on increasingly unreliable sea ice because it's the only idea they ever learned. It's all they know. Modern polar bears are doing what polar bears have been doing for generations because they have no consultants to teach them that they have the skills and the equipment to make a living on land like their grizzly cousins.
Unlike the grizzlies, polar bears don't hibernate and need roughly the same amount of food all year, so if their icy shopping carts one day fail to return, like some scientists predict, their inability to hunt on land like grizzlies will mean their extinction.
If, as some scientists predict, polar bears don't survive but their grizzly cousins do, it won't be because polar bears lack the necessary intelligence, speed, strength or tools to survive. If polar bears go extinct, it will be because they failed to adapt. If polar bears had consultants who could teach them how to act like their grizzly cousins when the sea ice is gone, polar bears wouldn't have to die.
A few months ago, after I wrote a column about leadership, I received some interesting e-mails from frustrated managers whose bosses won't let them make the changes needed to keep their businesses competitive or make them more efficient. I shared my polar bear analogy with a reader, and he urged me to share it in a column.
When I use the word "consultant," I'm not necessarily talking about people who have the words "consultant" or "consulting" on their business cards. Business owners who have hired smart, talented, creative people have a staff of consultants, but even the most innovative people develop what Fleming and Asplund (Human Sigma) have called "learned helplessness." People who are encouraged not to think, people whose ideas are always rejected, eventually just quit thinking and wait for the boss to tell them what to do.
I received a lot of e-mail from people like that in response to my "leadership" column.
I once knew a business owner who tried to insulate himself from "advice" and new ideas by asking unwelcome advisors how much money they made last year. If they didn't make more than he did, he would turn to one of his ever-present yes-men and ask loudly "Why do I need him?" I've been present a couple of times when this man silenced a whole roomful of new ideas by asking someone, "How much money did you make last year?" Apparently, it never occurred to this hardhead that if he created an atmosphere where people were free - even encouraged - to express new ideas, perhaps he might hear an idea that would make him even wealthier than he already was.
Some years ago, I got a call from my boss, who told me he was sending a freshly minted college graduate to work with me for a little while.
"He's gonna drive you crazy," said my boss. "He'll come up with 1,000 ideas and 999 of them won't be any good, but if you don't listen to his bad ideas, you'll never hear the good one."
When people and businesses fail to adapt, we sometimes call them dinosaurs, but I think we should call them polar bears. After all, consultants couldn't have stopped the space rock that killed the dinosaurs and most of the other animals on earth. Polar bears, however, are another story.
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