How Long Will Your Business Live?

Every living organism dies. This is a fact of life. Some species have a higher age on average than others. Even within the same species, populations may have different average ages depending on which habitat they are living in. Finally, individual organisms from the same species and living in the same habitat would vary in lifespan due to being predated upon, dying from disease or illness ,or changes in the habitat conditions or competition over resources. In all cases, dying is an inevitable consequence of life.

It is often that people starting new businesses are oblivious to the fact that their business will eventually come to an end and die one day. Yes this day might surpass the lifespan of the founder of the business himself or herself, but still each and every business does have an age no matter how long it is. Like in the living world of living organisms, businesses too vary greatly in lengths of their lives. A business may live over one hundred or even two hundred years while others may survive for 40 or 20 years, still others would not live more than a few years and in some cases a few months.

Success of a business is generally attributed to the length of time it can survive in the marketplace. This concept indeed has a lot of merit to it yet it is not always the case. Some businesses can be very successful financially even though they are designed to be short lived. They make profit in a short period of time and that profit can be funneled into other businesses later on. In some cases, their startup business may even be consumed by a larger organization. It is therefore advisable that when one is designing a new business he or she does not exclude the idea of designing a short lived type of business. Even if designing for a long lived business type, it is worthy to understand that no matter how long this business would survive, there would come a day when it would be over. Therefore, it is advisable to think how this business would be making a difference not only financially but also in the other spheres of life for its owners, employees, customers and the whole ecosystem it is living in on the financial, social and ecological spheres.

Life Tables

Life tables are commonly used for animals and plants. It is interesting to use life tables for humans too. It provides interesting stats for a given population. It would be nice to compare different peoples living in different regions of a country and see how their life tables differ. That would be quite an interesting analysis. Plotting the tables in graph form would make it easier to visualize and come up with insights.

How Long Does a Plant Live?

There are plants that live for one year only, or less, then die. Those are the annual plants. Tomatoes is one example of annual plants. There are plants that live for several years, those are called perennial plants. Trees are examples of perennial plants, for example fruit trees like apple and mango trees. There also exists a type of plants that grow for two years then die. They develop on two stages, during the first year they start growing then on the second year they give flowers and fruit. Plants belonging to this category are called biennial plants. Examples of biennial plants are onion and carrot.

A Call for Studying Urban Ecology in Cairo

Here is an interesting ecological formula:

N(now) = N(then) + B - D + I - E

This formulate indicates that the number of organisms, denoted by N(now), of a particular species occupying a specific area is equal to the number of such organisms present in the past, denoted by N(then), plus the number of births, B, between then and now, minus the number of deaths, D, plus the number of immigrants, I, minus the number of emigrants, E.

In the streets of Cairo, Egypt, we see cats and dogs even weasels, we also find crows, doves, home sparrows and sometimes hoopoes, bulbuls and other kinds of birds. It would be interesting to study the life of such organisms as part of the urban ecology. This would help us then devise methods by which to control and limit the dispersal of specific undesired species, such as dogs in the streets or crows , while encouraging the spread of others such as bulbuls and hoopoes.