Darwin
Strategic Concepts & Mechanics
Primary Evidence
"“Marketers still use simplistic models of human nature that remain uninformed by the past twenty years of research into human nature — research by evolutionary anthropologists, evolutionary biologists and evolutionary psychologists … as a result, they don’t have access to a good map of the human mind, or of the brave new semiotic world in which it dwells. What marketers need is Darwin.”"
"Macaulay, Gibbon, Darwin, Plato, and Aristotle,"
"We will be more risk conscious, but it irritates me when it is said that people like me need to operate much more like institutional investors because smaller players in the boom times were among the main protagonists of risk. This ignores the fact that the institutions were egging us on. When we said it might be risky they would say: ‘We trust you, we trust you. You figure it out but get us more risk and get us more results.’ It’s different with banks now, of course. When I say to them: ‘We can make a double-digit return here,’ they say: ‘We’re afraid that will fall through our risk profile.’ Instead of coaxing me to take more risk, my stakeholders are doing the opposite. We are talking about different stakeholders, of course. The ones who invested with me in the boom times did so because they knew I was a risk-taking special situations operator and they were of the same mindset, though they were one step removed. If anything went wrong, they could always blame it on me. Now it is the opposite. My stakeholders in Darwin wanted almost no risk at all – and I cannot blame them for that."
"Will the sort of storm-riding I did in the past still be possible? I believe that it will be, but in different ways. There will be more special situations but in a much wider array of sectors and geographies. And there may even be more opportunities, although it will be more difficult to crack them. It’s just going to be different. Evolution is at work, and Darwin famously said that it’s not the strongest or the smartest that survive but rather those that are more adaptable to change. So if I can adapt to new ways of doing things, I think there could be more, rather than less, action for me."