Organizational Sex
To quote How Companies Have Sex from FastCompany:
_
“Sex is the key to the future of business.”
-James Moore , Chairman, GeoPartners Research Inc.
_
I thought, what??? But it turns out that it’s a great concept for thinking about how to get new things going. Read this:
_Perhaps the biggest lesson in corporate sex is to recognize the dangers of asexual reproduction and excessive inbreeding. No matter how successful a company’s current product or business model, clones and cousins are unlikely to result in new triumphs of the same magnitude._
We all know that incest can be a really bad thing in terms of gene problems :) You need fresh stuff from the outside. You need new blood inside the company. The only problem I see here is that it really means that you need a Harem, a big pool of women or men, depending which sex you want to be yourself, or you yourself believe to be. Based on the article, the small company that looks for investment would be the woman, looking for a VC, the man, who previously just gave money, his semen, but now needs to give a lot more stuff like resources, connections and knowledge. Welcome to corporate emanzipation. ;)
Having a Harem comes with it’s own set of problems though. You need to make sure that you care for everybody equally well, that you can support them all and give everyone their time needed. If you want to bring a good child to this world you need a loving relationship to support it. You need to understand each others need and open communication.
_The second lesson is that organizational sex is not without its risks. One-night stands can lead to long-term regrets. In promiscuous pairings, bad things can get spread. There are organizational equivalents to sexually transmitted diseases, dangerous liaisons, even fatal attractions. At the same time, there is such a thing as organizational safe sex and committed relationships — combinations that pay attention to the long-term reasons for a particular pairing and manage closely the union of ideas, processes, and talent._
Thinking about all this in terms of sex, the question would be if you want to have sex with that other company and if you do, do you want it to be a one night stand or a committed relationship. What do you want from that relationship? Maybe every businessman should go out buying relationship books ;)