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While sitting in my front lawn watching the sunset, I noticed something I haven’t often seen before. Every so often, in the failing light, I saw something flittering above the tree line. At first, I thought it was birds. Then, I realized it was bats.
These mysterious and often maligned creatures were just starting their day – or night. What would have been dinnertime for me was just right for their first meal of the day. As I studied them, I began to realize some very important principles. These were common facts of life to them, but they were startling examples of best practices in business to me.
Created for a purpose: everything about bats – and most animals, really – shows a design mean to fulfill a purpose; their form fits their function. From their ability to use sonar to identify prey, to their lightweight body, to their wing structure allows them to be twilight predators of insects and fruit. They have special equipment that allows to successfully execute their purpose. Our businesses and ministries ought to be the same way; from our organizational structure, to our ability to find or create opportunity, to our flexibility and agility as a group of people, everything about what we do should form to fit our function.
Fills a niche: just as a bat’s body works to fulfill a mission, the bat itself fills a niche in the ecosystems of the world. Bats eat insects, helping to reduce their population, as well as fruit, helping to spread the seeds and pollinate plants, and their guano is a rich fertilizer. While several animals and insects will do some of these things, a bat is unique as a species in that it does all of them. It fills a niche; it does the things it does well and nothing more, nothing less. So, too, should our companies and organizations.
Operates in a favorable environment: bats are living creatures, so they need food, water, air, and shelter. They also are not at the top of the food chain, so they have to avoid their own predators. The half-light of twilight provides them with both an ample supply of food, as insects are more abundant at that time, less competition for water, as daylight animals are making their way to their dens and thickets, and protection from their predators, as with lower light they are more difficult to track. To put this in business terms, this operating environment maximizes opportunity while minimizing risk and this is the best place to try and execute a mission successfully.
There are many more lessons that can be learned and applied from bats, or any other number of animals.
Happy hunting!
Tags: animals, bats, bret ceren, business, capitalism, commerce, mission, New Iron Media, niche, purpose, structure