Management tips from Ants

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Management Tips From Ants
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HOW TO DEAL WITH HIGH OPERATING COST
Harvester ants which are living in the desert
have to spent water to get water. They lose
fluids from their body while searching for food
in the desert but they get it back out of the
seeds they collect. Since the ants store seeds
in their colonies, they don't waste their
searching efforts for extra seeds and leave them
on the ground for another hot and humid day.
They manage the operating cost so beautifully as
if they have an algorithm running to regulate
the flow of the ants. The algorithm is evolving
continuously towards minimizing the operating
cost. This is a sustainable strategy for any
running system.
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SCALING UP FROM SMALL TO LARGE SYSTEMS
Everyone starts small, so do ants. Just like
humans, ants need to have a system that is
robust enough to scale up when the colony grows.
Large systems often have some kind of messiness.
The ideal solution in a large colony is to
utilize each additional ant in such way that the
cost of producing and feeding one extra ant gets
surpassed. The tools that help large colonies to
function well are redundancy and minimal
communications.
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OPTIMIZATION FOR FIRST-MOVER ADVANTAGE
Ant colonies are examples of how evolution has
responded to different environmental
constraints. Places, where ant colonies seek for
foods from plants such as flower nectar and
watermelon rinds, the speed of searching is
essential as the colonies often compete with
each other. So they arrive first in the place,
take control of the food source and keep the
other ants away. The trick is to control the
flow of the ants. Colonies set up a circuit of
permanent highways and make sure it has an ant
almost everywhere all the time.
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Managing Security Breaches and Disasters
In tropical areas, many ant species live
together and compete against each other. So ants
have to take care of their security. Ant species
can use chemical trails of another ant species
and regulate their behavior according to the
nature of the security breaches. This is
obviously quite similar to human security system
where the evaluation of the system and repair of
the system breach takes place on a regular
basis. Unlike human being ants have found a way
to respond to the system breaches without any
central authority in place.
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