Smarter, Not Harder ... a paradox Churn is...
"Bees have to move very fast to stay still."
David Foster Wallace
In Through the Looking Glass, Alice, a young girl, gets schooled by the Red Queen in an important life lesson that many of us fail to heed. Alice finds herself running faster and faster but staying in the same place:Alice never could quite make out, in thinking it over afterwards, how it was that they began: all she remembers is, that they were running hand in hand, and the Queen went so fast that it was all she could do to keep up with her: and still the Queen kept crying ‘Faster! Faster!’ but Alice felt she could not go faster, though she had not breath left to say so.
The most curious part of the thing was, that the trees and the other things round them never changed their places at all: however fast they went, they never seemed to pass anything. ‘I wonder if all the things move along with us?’ thought poor puzzled Alice. And the Queen seemed to guess her thoughts, for she cried, ‘Faster! Don’t try to talk!’
Eventually, the Queen stops running and props Alice up against a tree, telling her to rest.
Alice looked round her in great surprise. ‘Why, I do believe we’ve been under this tree the whole time! Everything’s just as it was!’
‘Of course it is,’ said the Queen, ‘what would you have it?’
‘Well, in our country,’ said Alice, still panting a little, ‘you’d generally get to somewhere else — if you ran very fast for a long time, as we’ve been doing.’
‘A slow sort of country!’ said the Queen. ‘Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place.
If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!’
The Red Queen Effect means that staying in the same place is falling behind. Surviving another day means we have to co-evolve with the systems we interact with.If all animals evolved at the same rate, there would be no change in the relative interactions between species. However, not all animals evolve at the same rate. As Darwin observed, some are more “responsive to change” than others.
Species that are more responsive to change can gain a relative advantage over the ones they compete with and increase the odds of survival. In the short run, these small gains don’t make much of a difference, but as generations pass the advantages compound.
In describing the capital investment needed to maintain a relative placement in the textile industry, Warren Buffett:Over the years, we had the option of making large capital expenditures in the textile operation that would have allowed us to somewhat reduce variable costs. Each proposal to do so looked like an immediate winner. Measured by standard return-on-investment tests, in fact, these proposals usually promised greater economic benefits than would have resulted from comparable expenditures in our highly-profitable candy and newspaper businesses.
But the promised benefits from these textile investments were illusory. Many of our competitors, both domestic and foreign, were stepping up to the same kind of expenditures and, once enough companies did so, their reduced costs became the baseline for reduced prices industrywide. Viewed individually, each company’s capital investment decision appeared cost-effective and rational; viewed collectively, the decisions neutralized each other and were irrational (just as happens when each person watching a parade decides he can see a little better if he stands on tiptoes). After each round of investment, all the players had more money in the game and returns remained anemic.
In other words, more and more money is needed just to maintain your relative position in the industry and stay in the game. This situation plays out over and over again and brings with it many ripple effects. For example, the company distracted by maintaining a relative position in a poor industry places resources in a position almost assured to get a poor return on capital.