Is Your Consultant a Parasite?
Let’s start with apologies for the title. This is clearly offending to consultants, and the goal of this story is actually dead serious and respectful to good consultants — which do exist. Really. Not all consultants are parasites. This story is in part about recognising which are.
This is also a story about evolution and about nature and about economics. Given that ‘economics’ is just part of human behaviour, human ‘economics’ is also ‘nature’. So, it is not that strange that there are close links between economic thinking and how we look at biological evolution these days. Darwin, by the way, did not like the word ‘evolution’, as it came with a notion of (economic) ‘progress’ and he was clearly aware that (biological) ‘progress’ is (a) not the only outcome (species go extinct after all — most have), and (b) there is no sense in trying to say one form of ‘being the best adapted to circumstances’ is ‘better’ than another form of ‘being the best adapted to circumstances’. In economics of course there was a simple measure of ‘better’. And there the idea of positive ‘evolution’ made more sense (though neoliberal capitalist extremism is both rather naive and has very negative effects — but I digress, as usual).
In nature, there are many survival and reproduction strategies that make a species successful (‘well fitted to its environment’). And where the resources for those strategies overlap, there is competition. E.g. plants can be seen to compete for access to sunlight, with trees being the ones with the most long term strategy. There is also direct competition between hunter and prey — the ‘resource’ being the prey itself.
