“It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.” You may have come across this quote attributed to Charles Darwin often enough on the Internet. Or as is the fad these days, you may have seen it as a WhatsApp forward, with an image of Darwin, with a random year alongside. I once saw 1809 as the year associated with it. Darwin was, of course, only born in 1809, and that would make baby Charles quite a precocious toddler.
Yes, like most things that pass off as real on the Internet these days, this is fake too. Darwin never actually said that. The source is a 1963 lecture by a Louisiana State University business professor named Leon Megginson. He was paraphrasing something that he read in Darwin’s On the Origin of Species to apply to how an individual must live in society.
Fake Darwin quote it might be, but you can replace the word “species” with “businesses”, and it still makes absolute sense. The importance of being responsive to change for the sake of survival is something that pretty much every entrepreneur starting up instinctively knows. One of the main things that separates a startup from behemoth businesses is how unencumbered they are when it comes to adapting to changing conditions. Most big technology and IT companies that are slowly sliding towards obsolescence these days, are doing so because they failed to respond to changing market conditions.
But while their adaptiveness gives startups a huge advantage when it comes to changing market conditions, many startups forget a simple truth: Change for change’s sake is not good. Change is good only when you are actually responding to some stimulus in the market. Let’s say you are a startup dealing with healthy food, and offer a lot of low-fat options. But you realise that fat is not as big an enemy in people’s minds as it used to be, and sugar is the new megavillain; you will quickly change your offerings to reflect the new status quo. You do not advertise low-fat, low-cholesterol items any more, but talk more about keto diets, and sugar-free options. This is perfectly good. Your startup’s core idea has not changed. You are still offering healthy food. But you have quickly changed your offerings to stay in line with the changed definition of healthy food.
However, some startups have an unhealthy obsession with change. Take the same health food startup, for example. If they kept changing their offerings, say every week, based on individual articles about health food, which are a dime a dozen in the media anyway, they’d be contradicting what they used to sell earlier, with each new offering. The changes will not help them survive, but will instead, bring them down, because of their customers deserting them in confusion.
Then there is the other sort of change that startups like a lot. Pivoting. Startups that think that to pivot means to completely change their line of business, need to consult a dictionary.
The key to any sort of pivoting is to have your central idea intact, but turn on that central idea to execute it from a new angle — which is good. But if you lack a core idea, and keep changing your business model, even if you are responding to changing market conditions, you are just being a serial entrepreneur.
Not that it is a bad thing. Just like gambling is not necessarily a bad thing.
In this weekly column, we discuss the startup workplace. Thejaswi Udupa heads product and technology for an online building materials marketplace