Circular thinking is alien to the American tradition. Historically, we have plunged straight ahead, or created complex pyramidal management structures. Today, those forms lead to worker alienation, fail to factor in customers and other stakeholders, and make continuous improvement difficult. Instead, some organizations are following nature's lead, abandoning conventional hierarchical, linear management for charts resembling a spider web or even the solar system, involving all stakeholders on a continuous basis, and fostering continual, incremental change. Fourth, the terrarium teaches us that the Natural Economy corporation will, above all, be economical.
Nature is the harshest of test laboratories.
While dinosaurs are now found only in museums and Jurassic Park, their more efficient contemporaries, the cockroaches, still roam the world's kitchens. Mother Nature manufactures plants and animals the efficient way, one atom at a time. Finally, and most important, the Natural Economy will create value and growth from information more than from material. Here, the analogy between our terrarium and the economy is between the DNA that is the common element in all life worldwide and the digital information that is the common element in the global Information Age. Yet, while we share the same basic DNA, evolution has spawned an infinite variation of combinations of that DNA, not only differentiating species, but also us from our parents and our children.