You have no doubt heard of the decline in bees.

The collapse in the global bee population is a major threat to crops. It is estimated that a third of everything we eat depends upon honey bee pollination, which means that bees contribute some £26bn to the global economy. In the UK alone, bees contribute £200m a year to the economy through pollination.

Bees play a crucial role in pollinating some 90 commercial crops worldwide.

 It’s not just fruit and vegetables; alfalfa, a major cattle crop, is 90% reliant on pollination by bees. The British Beekeepers Association (BBKA) estimates that if people were to take over the job of pollination from bees in the UK, it would require a workforce of 30 million. In Southern Sichuan, pear trees are pollinated by hand after the honey bee population was wiped out.

Bees  extinction would mean not only a colourless, meatless diet of cereals and rice, and cottonless clothes, but a landscape without orchards, allotments and meadows of wildflowers – and the collapse of the food chain that sustains wild birds and animals.  Is that serious enough for you.

Lots of research is going on into the decline in bees.   Colony collapse disorder is the popular described affliction.  The varroa mite, which attacks the bees a key cause.

What is now being connected is that the main cause is in fact a lack of biodiversity. The simple logic is that the human use of bees for professional pollination has led to the breeding of a limited numbers of types of bees and a lack of biodiversity n the species of bees to allow bees to naturally survive and thrive:

• Biodiversity is…the variety of life on Earth > 13m species
• This is the real world wide web, and it’s all connected
• Oxygen you breathe from plankton in the oceans & leafy forests
• Fruit & vegetables you eat pollinated by bees
• Water, you drink part of a huge global cycle involving clouds, rainfall, glaciers, rivers and oceans.
• Biodiversity sustains these natural living systems
• It recycles waste, controls floods, regulates climate, etc
• It provides us with food, fuel, health, well being & future

Biodiversity is a thought many businesses might think about too.The lifecycle of a business is shorter and shorter.  World’s change. Markets change.  Consumers change.

Microsoft and Nokia once the leaders in their respective computing and mobile fields have seen their share prices steadily decline. They have seen their market dominance eroded.  A few years ago, they looked to merge in the mobile space to take on rivals like Apple & Google.

Google, lets not forget,  bought Motorola. That is a heck of a leap for a technlogy company who provides web services to move into manufacturing handsets.  Apple, in case we forget, spent years just making computers until Steve Jobs returned and they then made portable music machines, an internet friendly mobile phone and more recently the tablet, the watch and now TV.

Google and Apple are, of course, the easy much heralded examples of innovative companies who are in the tech space.  Consider instead Tesco.  Once a UK supermarket, it is now mainly international, but also a bank, petrol station, insurance company and an online retailer.  Amazon started in books. It now sells many things. It also created the Kindle, Amazon Prime and the voice activated AI in the home that is the Echo.

Success is often linked to the ability to innovate.  In hindsight, innovation sounds great.  The Ipad is a great idea. Yet we forget the Apple Newton.  Apple’s previous and failed attempt at  a tablet/pda. It was manufactured for Apple by Sharp in 1993 and killed off in 1998. Android is a great idea from Google and we all know about Google’s stretch into self driving cars  i yet we quickly forget what happened to Google Buzz – Google’s earlier sort of social idea that didn’t make the cut, or Google Glasses.  Everyone now talks about geo-location and check ins.  We may forget that Google bought Dodgeball a geo-location mobile check in service in 2005 before later closing it.  (The founders went on to start up again as Foursqaure.)  Google in fact has numerous ideas,over 100 acquistions, various innovations and not all of them have worked.

Albert Einstein once said “anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried something new”.  As the executives at Nokia or Microsoft or numerous other businesses pour over how their world changed – they’ll normally say they innovated. Nokia had its own version of an apps store before Apple. In the N95 – Nokia had a internet enabled mobile pre the launch of the i-phone that got rave reviews.  Microsoft had Windows software virtually everywhere.  Its web browser Internet Explorer was the default.  Now few phones run on Windows.  In many countries, Google’s Chrome or Mozilla’s Firefox (a not for profit collective) are what people use to browse the web.

Microsoft, Nokia and so many businesses innovated.  However, they didn’t innovate enough outside their model of how the world works.  As bee hive owners look for the collapse in the number of bees… they look for a cause that isn’t them.  Be it the varroa mite or the effect of mobile phone signals or whatever.  The pattern is similar in business. Companies look for a culprit that was not down to them. When the world changes they hang on to what they have and try to re-engineer it. When the i-phone launched Nokia saw it as (a) small (b) an elite and expensive user group (c) only in the USA – a market they were not big in and (d) one type of phone when they Nokia had many.

The truth is that breeds of creature, even species, eventually die out. The same is true of companies.  The issue for bees is not that the varroa mite or something else caused the bee population to plummet.  It is the fact that the diversity in the type of bees had been reduced from generation to generation.  We’d encouraged bees who were good at making honey or doing commercially pollination. We’d ended up with less and less types of bees. As we commercially farmed, we also wiped out the natural habitat of creatures that pollinate -i.e. help new things spread and grow. When the varroa mite hit – we had less species that could survive it – so the total bee population could not fight back or adapt. We had  less places off the beaten track where new pollinisation could come from. We’d created a perfect storm for bees – with few places for the species to hide or regroup.

Biodiversity is just as important in business. Microsoft for all its focus on computers also allowed itself to diversify into games consoles with the X-Box. As the new X-Boxes launch and diversify…they are not regretting it.  Originally, when it made software, it allowed itself to diversify into the internet with Explorer.  What is interesting about Xbox for Microsoft was it was a “skunk works”.  It wasn’t a part of the Microsoft’s culture and infact…in terms of innovation now…thank god. As Google sees Facebook change online behaviour, it is in part protected by its other previous diversifications. It means all Google’s eggs are not in one basket called search.  It also means that the company has a mindset and attitude that hasn’t just come from building one type of bee.  The management approach that led to the success of Android is core to how Google now looks to re-energise its approach to the whole company – the holding company name change to Alphabet reflects this reality writ large.

Of course business bio-diversity comes with no guarantees and comes with deadends. It comes with what seems like unnecessary distractions on new fronts when companies are fighting battles at home. It does also come with a better chance of survival in the long term.  If you don’t diversify your business and your thinking you may survive for years – the one sure thing is that one day the end will come. When it does – it will come quickly and not from where you might expect. Markets, consumers and business don’t just change – they mutate.  Businesses need to allow themselves to do the same.