The Acorn Method
Biomimicry in the Business World: Why Business Leaders Should Look At Oak Trees to Learn How to Grow in Uncertain Times
This month, the founder of prehype Henrik Werdelin’s debut book is coming out. It’s called “The Acorn Method” and it’s the methods and learnings we have used to co-created ventures inside companies like Nike, Unilever, Carlsberg, Verizon, and Lego.
What companies can learn from acorns?
Trees have been around for 350 million years and they know a thing or two about growing in uncertain times. From our vantage point as an entrepreneurs, we think trees have the most fascinating systems for regeneration. In the business world we need systems for regeneration too or we fade away… And we can look at oak trees and acorns specifically to steal lessons of growth, opportunity spaces, and root systems. Here are three things that an oak tree does that we can use in the business world.
You can learn how to incubate new products and services from acorns. Acorns are little packages full of DNA from the mother tree. They’re full of fats, sugar to fertilize. and strict rules: grow quick, grow straight and avoid getting eaten. To be a successful company today, you need to have a forest of products. Companies like Apple or Amazon are powerful today because they are much more than their original business lines. At BARK, we’ve created our own acorns by having autonomous teams build our dental, home, and food lines.
You can learn where there are market opportunities from how oak trees drop their acorns. By using different systems involving microorganisms, oak trees know where the most fertile ground is to drop their acorns. Use this philosophy to figure out where your next business has permission to drop and sprout your next acorn. Fascinatingly, oak trees drop more acorns when they think there might be a chance that the mother tree could die. Companies need to make sure they have a relationship with the customers and a brand positioning that allows them to have a wide opportunity space and a good method for choosing where to drop their acorns. Nike would, in my view, have the brand permission to launch a hotel, and users would know what to expect. It would be harder for Hilton to launch a shoe. For BARK, we don’t define ourselves as a utility we solve, we define ourselves (and our fertile ground) by the problem we solve for customers: make dogs happy. If we had the myopic view that our only fertile ground was subscription businesses, maybe we would have launched MeowBox. Instead, we now have a brand position in four categories of pet: food, health, essentials, and play.
You can learn how to govern your business sprouts by looking at the oak tree’s root systems. As much as 40% of the sugar an oak tree generates with photosynthesis, it redistributes to feed the root systems of the trees around it. That is why you’ll sometimes see a stump that is still alive even though it has no leaves. Solo trees that aren’t part of a forest grow faster, but they don’t last as long. The lesson is that you have to invent a good system where the mother tree can support sprouts and trees around it. For BARK, the reason we’ve been able to grow businesses like Bright and Super Chewer so quickly, is because it has the mother tree of the original BarkBox. The system is about governance and the very strict rules we impose on how the mother tree supports new initiatives. How do we do it? At BARK we launch a lot of different acorns, we look at the sprouts that grow straight up, and then we support those instead of the others. With BarkCare, a business we folded after about a year, it did grow, it just didn't grow as quickly as the others. In the tree world, if a tree doesn’t grow straight upward, other trees will spread their leaves and roots faster and the slow-growing sprout will die. In most corporate new venture projects, such a ‘default dead’ system is not in place. If they’ve launched a product that customers don’t love, the company continues to throw resources at it even though it’s not working. By doing that, the company wastes valuable resources growing something that ultimately will be too difficult to make successful. Taking inspiration from the trees, business leaders need to have a much easier time launching more businesses, but they also need to be disciplined on killing them. Read more about it all in The Acorn Method - https://bit.ly/acornmethod