What if an alien biologist landed on your desk?
The other day, I saw a very interesting phrase as I was skimming a series of random business articles:
“Business is an ecosystem, not a battlefield.”
My first reaction was “Well, duh.” That’s a pretty obvious worldview. A fraction of a second later, I remembered — “oh, yeah… most people don’t see business (or life) that way.”
Ecosystem-style thinking comes very naturally to credit union people.
If an alien biologist landed on our desk, we might even describe a credit union as a mostly self-contained economic ecosystem that benefits all participants and its environment.
Their opposite, banks and other for-profit financial institutions, could be described more like factory farms or mines; artificial ecosystems controlled for the maximum benefit of an entity outside the ecosystem.
But for some reason a lot of people still have a “battlefield” view of business and life; there are winners and losers, and for every win, there must be a loss (AKA a zero-sum mentality). Perhaps it is the convenience it offers to those in charge, since the battlefield view is a lot easier to use to make quick decisions.
I sometimes wonder if this fundamental difference in worldview may be why we have such a hard time communicating the credit union difference.
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