The "Swarm Intelligence" of the Young Entrepreneurs

Bees…ants…wasps… all of these insects have one thing in common: they are “social” insects. Each of them work together for common goals. Building intricate nests. Protecting their queens. And helping maintain their empires. Well did you ever think about young entrepreneurs as a “social” community working together for common goals?

I think that we can learn a lot from these social insects as we build our businesses. Sure, with one powerful idea and the determination to push forward and actually create something, the single entrepreneur can be a formidable creature. But what about a collaborative effort? What if we not only worked hard on creating success for ourselves, but also worked hard on helping others become successful and helping others with ideas, feedback, and support? Interesting concept, eh?

If we – young entrepreneurs – can form a community around building our own nests – businesses — whiles simultaneously helping others in the community build their own, we can become more than formidable – we can become deadly!

Heck, as far as I'm concerned, we're all working on building the same nest. Each of are simply carrying different pieces of rock and sand, but we're all working within the same nest such as the ants and bees are working together to build their fortresses to protect their eggs, food, and queens.

…the great success of social insects can be attributed to their sophisticated means of communicating with one another. In addition, by weight of numbers, a colony can overpower enemies and monopolize food sources. It can also perform many tasks simultaneously, and one set of workers can finish tasks that another set has left incomplete…

Just as the ants communicate to overpower their enemies and hunt for food, young entrepreneurs must organize to help one another fight as well. However, our enemies aren't the same as the ants. Our enemies are of a different nature. We must fight through limits. Fight against the naysayers. Fight against the odds. Fight to push ourselves to surpass our highest expectations. Fight to change the world.

Our strength lies in our numbers. If we unite and work together, we can become a force that the business world has never seen before. We sure as hell have the brainpower and determination, but we still have a ways to go before we see more of us uniting and lending helping hands to one another.

Why do so many of us have this attitude of not reaching out to others? Why do we plot and scheme? Why do we turn our backs when people ask for advice or recommendations? Is this the type of attitude that you think will help you become a dominant player in this entrepreneurial game? I beg to differ.

…social insects may individually seem inefficient and even stupid, but the colony as a whole can achieve something that appears to be the result of planned, intelligent design. Working in the emerging field known as “swarm intelligence”, which owes much to observations of the way social insects do things, computer scientists have applied the principles of self-organization to running several types of complex systems required by human economic activity. These include telephone networks, Internet search systems, factory production lines….

What is lost by tolerating a level of individual error is more than made up for by the robustness, flexibility, and economic efficiency of the system as a whole. In this way, we continue to learn from social insects in ways never imagined by earlier observers of these enthralling creatures.

Should we give away all our ideas and devote all of our time helping others? Absolutely not. Competition still exists and that's what pushes us forward as a community. But that doesn't mean that we can't help one another as we each pursue our own interests.

Yes, we can be great alone. But if we unite, we can be more than great – we can be brilliant. None of us will ever be “perfect” businessmen. None of us will ever be perfect at anything. Is anything perfect? But with our “swarm intelligence” we can do things that no one man could ever do. That no one business can ever do.

I'm not telling you go out there are partner with every business person you see on the street. I'm not even encouraging you to expand your team with more partners or things of that nature.

What I am saying is that the entrepreneur needs to spend time interacting, helping, working out problems, listening, caring for, and showing appreciation with other entrepreneurs that are on the journey of building a successful business as well. This isn't a zero-sum game, we can all win.

Find the ant within.

Excerpts from:

“Social Insects”. Grzimek's Animal Life Encyclopedia. The Gale Group, Inc, 2005. Answers.com 28 Aug. 2006.

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