Jan 11
25
Following my post on storytelling, I got this story from a close friend of mine. He in turn must have got it from someone else. Let me just thank all those great farmers out there, starting with the farmer in the story who made it possible for the story to reach me. Here goes:
There was a farmer who grew superior quality and award-winning corn. Each year he entered his corn in the state fair where it won honor and prizes. One year a newspaper reporter interviewed him and learnt something interesting about how he grew it.
The reporter discovered that the farmer shared his seed corn with his neighbors’.
“How can you afford to share your best seed corn with your neighbor’s when they are entering corn in competition with yours each year?” the reporter asked.
“Why sir, “said the farmer, “didn’t you know? The wind picks up pollen from the ripening corn and swirls it from field to field.
If my neighbor’s grow inferior, sub-standard and poor quality corn, cross-pollination will steadily degrade the quality of my corn.
If I am to grow good corn, I must help my neighbor’s grow good corn.”
The farmer gave a superb insight into the connectedness of life. His product cannot improve unless his neighbor’s product also improves. So it is in the other dimensions.
Time and time again this has been illustrated in human history. The Medici Effect which characterized the Renaissance creating an explosion of breakthrough ideas and innovation through cross-pollination between different disciplines fields and cultures. The most amazing and innovative things on the internet are shared freely, the world leading browser Firefox or Sun’s Java programming language, MySQL database and the OpenOffice.org office productivity suite.
It is an imperative to develop a company culture that shares stories, ideas and insights. This enables best practices to be shared and used on a global scale to help an organization to become efficient and productive and innovative.
Nations, industries and institutions become leaders when they practice the culture of seeding and sharing versus harvesting and hoarding. In its absence they will never be able to realize their true potential. It is no surprise that companies like IBM, Eli Lilly, Raytheon, 3M are who they are – they share their ideas and best practices internally and with the world. Success does not happen in isolation. It is inherently a participative and collaborative process
What have you shared lately?
