A WORLD OF APPLES AND ORANGES

October 18, 2012 

 

Human society thrives because of the vast differences from one human being to another.  It is those differences that enable our society to perform the tremendous variety of functions necessary for our continued survival.  Our society wouldn't exist if we were all doctors and lawyers.  We need hunters and gatherers.  We need farmers and grocers.  We need brains and brawn.  We need males and females.  We need healers, nurturers, and entertainers.  We need people that see beauty in objects as well as people that see beauty in numbers.  Within specialized functions such as pediatricians and dairy farmers, we need people with similar specialties to work together to help the function evolve toward greatness.  We need people to learn and build upon the specialties to make them better and more productive.  We need those with an aptitude for a certain specialty to enter the specialty as students, grow to being capable apprentices, learning to master the function, and then teaching what has been learned to new generations of students.  It is processes like these, in each area of specialty, that allow our society to advance itself.  Too often, however, people get the erroneous idea that success in one specialty can be transferred to success in an unrelated specialty.  Such thinking hinders the advancement of society.  Consider the following:

 

 

Apples that are exclusively supervised by oranges are much less likely to thrive than apples that are supervised mostly by other apples.  That is not to say that a good orange can’t add major value to the supervision of apples.  In fact, there may be things apples could learn from oranges that could be adapted to the benefit of apples.  Let's take this path of thought and apply it to a couple of examples that provide a better portrayal of human society:

 

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Example 1 of 2:

 

Imagine if Mr. X is the CEO of General Motors that brings GM to the top of the auto industry.  Microsoft decides to restructure itself.  Since Mr. X did such a fantastic job bringing GM to the top, Microsoft decides to bring in Mr. X as the new CEO during their restructure.  Mr. X doesn’t know any existing Microsoft supervisors, so Mr. X decides to bring in his own management team from GM in an effort to bring Microsoft to a level where it can crush Apple.  How likely is it that Mr. X will succeed as CEO of Microsoft?

 

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Example 2 of 2:

 

Let’s say we have a group of 200 young boys that have never played soccer.

100 randomly selected boys will play in the Green Division.

The 100 remaining boys will play in the Yellow Division.

Green Division coaches will be selected from a group of highly experienced soccer coaches that played soccer in their past.

Yellow Division coaches will be selected from a group of highly experienced baseball coaches that never played soccer.

At the end of one year of games and practices, each Division will select an all-star team of their top 15 players.

What Division is most likely going to win the all-star tournament and why?

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

 

So, as society works to develop its specialized needs, strong consideration needs to be given to the student, apprentice, master, teacher evolution.  If oranges are always teachers and apples are always students, then apples will never reach their true potential and the fruity society will not advance as quickly as it should.