this fundamental difference in worldview may be why we have such a hard time communicating the credit union difference.

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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