Business Lessons from the Rainforest
Wealth Lessons from Nature
BY
DR Nzewi Dozie
SMASHWORDS EDITION

PUBLISHED BY DR Nzewi Dozie on Smashwords
Business Lessons from the Rainforest
Wealth Lessons from Nature
Copyright © 2012 by DR Nzewi Dozie.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form
or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the
prior permission of DR Nzewi Chukwudozie, 48 New York Avenue NW, Washington, DC. 20001.
(571)-268-3465.
Acknowledgement.
This is to acknowledge the owners of the photographs used in the cover of this book.
1. For the photograph Daintree Rainforest originally uploaded by Adz at
en.wikipedia. Released under GNU Free Documentation License.
Introduction
The rainforest is the richest ecosystem on the planet, with half of its entire species,
and most of its fresh water. There are more species of fish in the Amazon than all the
entire Atlantic Ocean, more in one pond than all of the British Isle. One hectare (3.7
acres) may contain 750 species of trees and 1500 species of other higher plants. They
collect by far more energy from the sun than humans consume. My entree into the
rainforest was in Cameroon which has part of the Congo Forest. Indelible to my

“weather storms”. Collectively they constitute a storm breaker. However not all risks
can be shared, like the risk of being struck by lightning. An uninsurable risk.
The Understory.
These are a third layer of plants. They do not try to compete for sunlight; instead
they develop strategies to catch enough like broad leaves. The coco-yam has two or
three leaves each like a telescopic dish capturing as much of the remaining 20 per
cent of the sunlight that reaches this level as possible, well ahead of star-gazing
telescopes at space observatories. They are protected from the weather, but being
small these plants are vulnerable to animals, so some store their carbohydrates
underground in their roots(tubers), some don’t form seeds, they will grow from stems
and cuttings. This is the niche market. Some plants climb the giants to reach the sun,
twisting around him, sometimes very aggressively; sometimes sinking roots into his
stem, there are lessons here for the small business. Some plants are not that
aggressive but just grow on debris that gathers on the giant.
The Forest Floor
Littered with dead leaves and decaying branches this is the recycling business. It is
very efficient and work dispatched very quickly. Fallen branches go quick, devoured
by an army of microbes which include bacteria and fungi, yielding organic material to
reconstitute the soil and supply the higher layers. Here you will see big mushroom
growing on dead tree trunks. So recycling could be a big operation. However the
microbes do most of the work.
The Animals
These live and feed on forest products. They disperse seeds and pollinate flowers.
They prune plants of weak branches. They ensure the big trees seeds as well as that
of the up comer get dispersed. They make sure the forest is well mixed. The gene
pool of the forest is well mixed for strength as they enhance cross pollination. More
importantly they are the reason why there are no “bubbles” and “crashes” in the

Human Activity.
Human activity is a nonspecific stress on the plants and animals of the forest. The
loggers create routes and move heavy equipment to get to the big trees. They kill a
giant that has been growing for hundred years dislodging the birds and animals that
nest on it. They move the log and heavy equipment killing more plants and animals.
They change the topography by making roads and might cause erosion. Who knows
what the effects of the sudden gaps in the forest cover are on the equilibrium of the
rainforest? Government intervention in the market place could be as disruptive as
unregulated logging in forests. Business wants stability and dislikes uncertainty. It
enables it to plan into the feature. Changing market policies make it impossible for
businesses to project into the future. Frequent government incursions into the market
with policy changes kills businesses like illegal logging kills trees
Friendly tax schedules brings in investment and has been used to unleash specific
industries like IT and green technology in many places, or promote an economic zone
like Dubai in the UAE and Cotonou in West Africa. Conversely many businesses have
left Cameroon in central Africa because of extreme taxation. Just like human
encroachment forces animal life to migrate from the forest, government policy may
force business to migrate to other markets. Human activity was going to kill a forest
in the Dust Bowl but for tree planting.
Disease.
Forests are more resistant to sporadic disease and pests than agricultural vegetation.
I certainly have never heard of a forest or a species in it failing from a disease
outbreak. The intense cross-pollination is certainly protective. The diversity within
the forest is also protective for one species may be repelling a pest that afflicts

by nationalistic governments to gain control over sectors of their economies to the
exclusion of foreign players. This they accomplished through nationalization. The
companies were also attributed a national security function: they were used to
exclude foreign persons from “sensitive” sectors with national security significance.
And finally they were used to help conserve the balance of payments of the countries
that owned them. Imagine a foreign operator providing utilities in a country as a
monopoly or at the mildest with great dominance, it amounts to a drain pipe on the
foreign exchange of the host country. The solution to this was a nationalized
monopoly. The Russian giant Yukos remains a monument of the period of privatization
that made the state-owned business model obsolete.
The capital intensive sector.
Some sectors of the economy are inevitably capital intensive making firms that
operate in them large out of necessity. A good example is the oil sector where drilling
is very expensive. The terrain for their work can be difficult, with off-shore rigs
required in some situations. The volumes of commodity moved are very huge and
require expensive infrastructure like pipelines. Further processing requires very
expensive plants (refineries). Thus oil companies are huge operations requiring a
great deal of capital investment. Airline manufacturers are a second group of
companies that are huge by necessity. Their product is highly complex, possessing a
great many component parts, with their being stringent regulations to meet. Aircraft
are expensive products, so are the plants and processes to make them. Thus aircraft
makers like Boeing and Airbus are among the biggest companies in the world.
Little competition.
A company that develops software has copyright to it for a stipulated period during
which it can exploit it for profit exclusively. When there are no comparable
substitutes then the company can have very profitable pricing and optimal sales. Thus
the company can grow very rapidly, and needs to grow rapidly to satisfy demand.

making the biggest airliner ever; which was going to convey huge numbers of people
to regional hubs from where to continue their journeys. Boeing chose to go farther,
providing direct flights to centers for which passengers may have otherwise had to
change planes. Airbus offered airlines cheap through scale of capacity. Less cost
moving large numbers of ready passenger plus the spectacle, wonder, excitement and
attraction of the biggest airliner ever, the A380. Boeing offered airlines cheap
through scale of range. Eliminating the need to change planes.
Old companies.
Some big corporations accumulated their assets over a long time. Some have been big
for a century.
Modus operandi of the emergent gigantic companies.
Like the emergent trees of the rain forest these giant companies are very secure in
their finances and business. They deal with competition that is not stifling but mostly
about market share. They don’t face a day to day threat to go under. They are
relatively sparsely concentrated (yet are in real competition with one another). The
threats they face like with the trees come from within. The little foxes that spoil the
vine. Historically they have been hit by accounting malpractice-cooking the books,
dangerous loss making trading, and bad mergers.
Lesson from the rainforest
The way the emergent trees carry out business lends lessons to the big
conglomerates.
1. The focus of their growth activity is strengthening their stem and root system.
Compared to their size their foliage is not impressive as they usually consist of
a few branches, sub-branches and unimpressive leaves. Their flowers and
fruits are equally bland. They do no invest much in these. This is the strategy:
they are by nature tall trees and have their foliage well above the canopy so
they get sunlight absolutely without any encumbrance. This is the equator

after one it’s traders lost two billion dollars. It is hard for the tall trees to
protect themselves against lightning being distinctly taller than the canopy.
Huge companies who must necessarily place massive funds under the control
of single individuals must set up early warning mechanisms and also take out
insurance.
4. The same scenario elucidated could happen following an erratic decision by
top management. The British media agency The News of the World sank
pretty quick following poor judgment about what is allowed and not allowed
in the practice of sourcing news. This profitable news agency had to be
scuttled as this one practice it was engaged in proved pretty toxic. It was
reverse role play when journalists used Gestapo or KGB methods. I wondered
whether the voluntary disbandment of the media house was done to prevent
the light being shone long on the whole it was part of. To dispel focus. A
gangrenous member was cut off and it would not be known the state of the
rest of the body. I was surprised such a valuable venture as The News of the
World was preferably sunk as against being sold. It was like the news agency
was struck by lightning.
5. A steadier problem the tall trees have to face is wind…sometimes storms.
These are quite frequent in the wet season when torrential storms seem to
want to tear whole trees apart. The trees weave from side to side wrestled by
the rainstorm spreading out its branches like the fingers of one hand as if to
wrench the very life out of it. This happening to a standalone tree giant well
above the canopy is a ghostly sight…almost sickening. The giants have to put
up with storms. Like BP had to do last year with the deep water horizon oil
spill in the gulf Mexico. It was a global storm that caused the head of BP to
fall and will leave its coffers serial billions short. This was combination of
environmental and host community interest beating on a company. It was not

that broke was due to the privateerism that had been at play in that wild, wild
south.
This is not to say there have not been violations by companies on the rights of
local communities. But where this has happened there are proper channels and
due processes for seeking redress. It could be hard to deal with the clout of some
multinationals government may not be representative. Yet there is no place
wantonry that serves only the interests of malignant elements not the community.
Companies must pay compensation when they violate people’s rights. Charges
should be pressed where crimes may have been committed. The problem is
government who collects taxes and royalties but do not benefit communities. If
government did its duty business would not need to pay twice.
Charity has always been voluntary, it is wrong for the poor to steal from the rich
just as it is wrong for the rich to steal from the poor. It is wrong for society to
victimize the rich minority for it never has been a crime to be rich or black or
female.

The Canopy
Here is where the competition is stiffest. The trees compete for sunlight. In the market it is
a competition for market share. First they have to be seen by potential clients so they
advertise intensively. It is a delicate balance where loss of focus could cause a terminal lag.
Falling short at this level of the forest deprives from sunlight and leads to poor tree
health. An occasional tree would be seen to be lanky and sickly as it races upward in
the shadow of another, sometimes even bent, seeking the sun. The biggest problem
facing firms at this level of the market is competition; it is a fight to the death. They
compete for customers, suppliers, staffing, location and any necessity or privilege
important for that line of business. In the rainforest there are no fanciful strategies
than to send the root deep and wide, grow, grow, grow, and make a many leaves.

4. Since pricing is the most important competition point it is important to
appreciate that part of the measures to minimize production costs is to
minimize the cost of raw materials and supplies. All other costs must also be
kept as low as possible working in the canopy.
5. Players in the middle range of business must keep abreast of what is happening
in the market, especially what the competition is doing. They then respond
accordingly to remain at the edge of business.
6. Finally there is still a place for cooperation among competitors. Firms should
cooperate where there is common interest. Some things are best done as a
group. Scale is an advantage already high-lighted. If companies in the same
line of business cannot annihilate the competition (and the law is weighted
against this) they must co-exist. There are always determinants common to all.
Challenges they all have to deal with. Working as a herd may enable them
solves the problems more easily. Indeed this may be the only way to ward off
local government or state and federal regulation. Even warring parties do enter
into truces and cease fires, to continue belligerence at a later date. Like the
trees in the canopy collectively form a wind breaker canopy companies ought
to work together to develop common interests.
The understory.
This is a third tier of plants. They are shrubs and small trees that have no way to
compete directly with plants in the canopy, nor can they compete with the
emergents. They have to overcome inevitable disadvantages of being small. These
include being deprived of sunlight as they are completely shaded by the canopy
overhead and being vulnerable to damage by animals (because of their size). The
advantage they have is being completely shielded from storms, and from lightning.
They solve the problem of low access to sunlight by a variety of measures. Some are
climbers, for example the yam plant. They climb the stems of plants in the higher
a shade. So the small mama and daddy company have a place in the market and can
survive if they copy the little plants of the rainforest.
THE GRASSES FEED THE WORLD… and the tubers too: The grasses: wheat, barley,
rice, maize or corn, millet, sorghum, sugar cane feed world. The tongue–shaped
leaves, tall fleshy stems and the large amount of seed on a very few fruits are their
hallmark. Their seeds are used to make flour everywhere. These belong to an
exclusive group of plants called C4 plants to which only 10% of all plants belong. The
others are called C3 plants. C4 plant captures carbon dioxide from the atmosphere
faster than C3 plants. No wonder the grasses feed the world (the animals included).
They grow fast and yield a crop in months. Unlike other plants their leaves grow from
the base up, so if grazing animals chop off the leaf tip the leaf continues to grow.
Other leaves grow at the very tip. If bitten off growth stops. The grasses are energy-
capture machine which are not into fanciful flowering, nor permanent structures like
strong woody stems or much root. They pack carbon from the atmosphere as fast as
they can and are done in less than a year. They are very easy to grow.
The tubers: yams, coco -yams and cassava make a good impact feeding the world.
They are the carbon packers of the rain forest. Having to compete for sunlight yams
are climbers , that way they reach the top of the canopy, the coco-yams don’t go for
height, they have two or three permanent broad leaves like telescope dishes catching
every light signal. This design precedes the parabolic dishes of astronomic telescopes
and satellite TV receivers. The cassava makes no seed; channeling its effort towards
storage (underground) of the carbohydrate it makes and like sugar cane (a C4 grass)
can be grown from the stem. It does not invest in permanent structures. These
rainforest carbon packers cannot afford to make seeds or store carbohydrate above
ground as the density of bird and animal life would not allow it. The seeds or stores
would be eaten.
1. Offer what the big rival cannot offer. Like hand made as against machine
made. Your clientele is small, so take advantage of it. Produce with extra

stealing from your business. Remember your capitalization is small and can be
easily wiped out.

The forest floor
Here a general service is provided to the forest turning dead material into manure.
Plants utilize energy from sunlight to synthesize organic material like cellulose
(fiber), carbohydrates (starch), proteins and oils. When plant material or animals die
the forest floor takes care of business. Saprophytes devour the dead plant or animal
tissue breaking them down to simple substances that other plants use and eventually
animals, up the food chain. The saprophytic sector involves ants, worms, and fungi
large like mushrooms and small microbial fungi, bacteria and other microscopic
organisms. Ants and worms break down the dead material to finer particles and
increase the surface area available for the microbes and mushroom to act. This
recycling process is critical to the existence of the rain forest as the soils are very
poor being shallow and leached by the heavy rainfall. Nutrients must be recovered
from the dead plants and animals or the forest will not be. The recycling sector of the
forest is very advanced, sophisticated and rapid. So it should be with human societies
especially cities, for humans produce much more waste per head. What a waste it
would be not to take a cue from the forest.
Recycling is still a novel idea in most of the world (though it’s going on in nature all
around). How many recycling companies are listed on the stock-exchange? It is a
veritable sector to grow a business in, especially in the developing world. The
potential here is like it was in the IT sector in the early to mid –nineties. In the
market the forest floor represents the businesses which provide the services for other
companies. Who provide bags for retail shops, components the automobile giants,
pipes and such for the oil giants, researchers and recruiters, banks and insurers…
small contractors that do things for businesses that businesses cannot efficiently do

Leone and Congo DR, and has been said to be the bane of Nigeria. Discovery of oil
wealth in Angola raised concerns, a paradox predicated on happenings in other places
including Sudan. The Kimberly process to regulate the sale of diamonds and prevent
its use to fund wars demonstrates how serious a destabilizing factor wealth in the soil
can be. It is striking that those countries low in natural resources have economic
centers with housing structured like the rainforest. Skyscrapers, buildings of
intermediate height, and low buildings. Singapore has the highest number of
skyscrapers. It would seem that depending intensively on commerce and industry (the
market) rather than the sale of a natural resource produced this structure, the
different heights reflecting different sizes of businesses. Thus this multilayered
format may be the principle for any system that allows free intensive competition.
The single-resource countries still have rather flat city profiles. They dig deep but
don’t grow. While in the market-driven countries spread flat and grow tall. The
shallow soils warrant the trees of the rainforest to have expansive buttresses that
spread up to 30ft to keep them secure. Roots the sizes of tree trunks that you can sit
on are not rare in the rainforest.
Lesson
1. You do not need massive amounts of capital to start up off and succeed in
business. Shortage may inspire creativity; surplus may kill drive.
Leaves
The leaves of rainforest plants are adapted to the ecosystem. They have drip tips and
grooves in the lower layers to conduct water and facilitate water loss from the plants
through a process called transpiration. They are large in the shaded levels but small
and dark green in the
emergent layer to achieve the opposite reduce desiccation by dry winds. Some leaves
are on stalks that turn with the movement of the sun.
Lesson

business.
The realities are that Joe is using his savings for the venture and does not know the
business very well.
Advice: He has to find a river bank. Here the vegetation is not dense and trees are
sparse. So there is no significant competition. However there is no shielding from the
wind and the river floods from time to time. The grass is almost choking. But there is
sunlight, and plenty of water.
Smith decides to start up in a locale where there is no competition but he must trade
this off with their being little logistics. He decides to strain against predictable
challenges like poor supply networks, poor market links, than combat suffocating
competition. If his business dies it would be a slow death and he will have time to
make changes or run. In the thick of it, inside the city, he may never take off. The
high cost of logistics could easily smother his business. From the periphery he’ll have
the time to learn more about the business and possibly develop a niche that takes
advantage of being away from the rest. Per chance turn disadvantage to advantage.
If he succeeds he’ll have the advantage of a pioneer in the locality of his startup.
He’ll be a prominent fixture in its commercial landscape; capable of securing it’s
resources like choice locations for himself. He’ll be ahead of any new comers in local
knowledge, business connections and political links. It may take a while though to get
there.
Jasmine is a skilled teenager with bright ideas and great IT skills. She’s had a blog
since age nine, has lived a good part of her other nine years on the internet. Maturing
she’s having more responsible ideas about using her talents she wants to start a
commercial internet company, but the field is obliterated by Facebook, you tube,
Amazon and an endless list of behemoths and she has no money. She climbs on the
giants. She starts a site where people contribute stories about celebrities, posting
pictures. She spends hours daily hunter-gathering celebrity news from the giants’
websites and others and retelling them on her site. She gathers links to freebies and
posts them for her visitors, uses word of mouth and every legal tactic to spread the
word. Eventually advertisement comes and it includes products from celebrity: their

unattractive fruit. Trees like mangoes, guavas, and oranges overcome the threat of
their progeny being consumed by making lots of seeds in lots of fruit. The papaya
plant makes very many seeds in not many fruits, the coconut hide its seed in strong
hide. There is only fibrous covering, no fruit. The white pulp is the inside of its seed
and you must crack open the hard shell to reach it, in which case you are eating seed.
This seed will float on the ocean to germinate when it makes a landing on the shore,
sometimes on islands. Thus the coconut is the tallest plant on many tropical islands.
The coconut is an emergent, making only fiber and no flesh it needs no seed
disperser. Fruit is a form of inducement to have animals a plants seed, just like
nectar is a reward to have insects pollinate a trees flowers. These inducements
resemble the bribes government officials in developing countries sometimes demand
in return for helping Western companies win contacts. It is good that this practice
now constitutes a crime in some of the home countries of the companies.
Another successful palm is the oil palm. Almost identical to the coconut it produces
many fleshy fruits around a hard nut, as hard as the coconut but much smaller. The
fruit is embedded in very sharp spikes so the fruits cannot be retrieved. A human
cannot do so with bare hands without getting injured (unless the fruit had become so
ripe until it was soon going to come off
the bunch). Uninterfered with the tree drops fruit as they ripen; a few at a time to
maximize dispersal. The fruity flesh around the hard nut is reward for the work of
dispersal. The oil palm and the coconut palm are virtually indistinguishable trees yet
one requires animal seed dispersal and the other natural forces like ocean currents.
Different approaches to solving the same problem. The lesson for business here: seek
for best fit as much as possible.
Why does the oil palm choose to pay a commission to have its seed dispersed and not
the coconut? It is because of the nature of their natural habitat. The coconut builds
boats for its seed to sail around the world; the oil palm tempts squirrels to take a

I did not lose any money though. Surely the next crash is on its way. The next crash
is always only a matter of time. I believe managing money is a do–it–yourself thing.
How could one hand over his life savings to a faceless group of directors and board
who are also in it for themselves? It’s not their money and they will play roulette to
make buck. How else is a billion dollars lost this hour recovered the next than by
turning a wheel? Of course it is not quite like this. However if your portfolio is too
large for you to manage and hold a day job then your portfolio should be your day
job. If you do not make as much as your money manager did it is because you are
careful. When the next crash comes you’ll hit a jackpot. Manage your money yourself
if you can. There no bubbles or crashes in the rainforest. Too rapid growth stimulates
the animal population to increase. This increases the consumption forest products so
the rapid growth is checked and does not develop into a bubble.
Yakub an Afghan refugee was looking to start a business in Pakistan. He chose what
he knew: the transit business conveying passengers over distances 50km or less. He
bought a bus and registered at the City Council bus station. The arrangement was that
bus operators took numbers as they came in the morning which was their turn to load.
Turn one loads first, turn ten loads tenth. There were nineteen bus owners not
counting those who went for repairs. With only about ten hours of daylight available
for loading and it taking over an hour to load one vehicle it meant that about half of
all turns lapsed into the next day. So the bus owners worked only every other day or
less. This is a recession. Disappointed, Yakub left the City Council bus station to hire a
store-front where he ran an independent bus station. It took only ten minutes to load
a bus. The passengers no more wary of long waits flowed like a stream. Yakub had
only seven buses registered in his company. The buses made a round trip every two
hours, spending only twenty minutes at each end of the trip to refuel and reload.
With almost thirty roundtrips the seven drivers were fully occupied and the seven
buses fully utilized. The seven buses did altogether by far more business than the