Betting the Farm

Andrew J. Sherman is a partner in the Washington office of Jones Day and a recognized international authority on the legal and strategic issues affecting small and growing companies. His latest book is Harvesting Intangible Assets, Uncover Hidden Revenue in Your Company’s Intellectual Property.

Image: Photo Illustration by Sean Driscoll

The United States began as an agrarian economy, evolved into an industrial economy, and then shifted to an information-based economy, but, in many ways, we have never stopped being farmers.

Our new crops are knowledge, systems, channels, processes, know-how, brands, relationships, and intellectual property, and we must care for these resources and drivers of shareholder value in the same way that our farming ancestors tended to their fields.

In order to grow in a slow economy and a resource-constrained environment, both entrepreneurs and leaders of more established companies must deploy capital-efficient growth strategies that will drive profits and shareholder value. Trillions of dollars worth of unharvested, intangible assets are sitting on the vines of Fortune 1000 companies, universities, government labs, and even nonprofits. Instead of letting our best ideas languish, we must harvest them on a timely basis and bring them to the marketplace or they will rot and be wasted. We are not operating in an economy where valuable assets can be discarded just because leaders are distracted or shareholder value is being ignored.

No matter what your profession, no matter what your company does, no matter what your life situation may be—we all follow a fundamental and deeply rooted agricultural process in some way throughout the days of our lives. We are all the new agrarians. But do we recognize ourselves as such? Have we learned from the successes and failures of the agrarian economies that preceded us? Can we learn to apply the traditional as well as the latest best practices of farming to our daily lives and in the growth of our companies? How can we make our lives more enjoyable and enriching and our companies more productive and profitable by adopting an agrarian approach to life planning, time management, resource allocation, innovation harvesting, and business-model reshaping?

Consider the following questions as they apply to your life and to your business:

• Have you carefully selected a territory that is fertile for growth and right for your type of crop?
• Do you understand the dynamics and challenges presented by the influencers in your ecosystem?
• Have you done everything in your power to properly nurture the soil and enhance the land’s ability to produce?
• What seeds will you plant and why?
• Are you ready to invest the time and energy to care for these seeds once they're planted?
• Whom will you hire to help you raise, harvest, and sell the produce at your farm?
• Which tools, resources, and expertise will you require to maximize the fruits of your harvest?

Each of these questions must be answered by every type of farmer, every year, in every country around the world. Every year, they “bet the farm,” overcoming the challenges of the wind, sun, drought, floods, and other conditions beyond their control to put food on all of our tables. But the questions also apply to each of us as entrepreneurs, company leaders, and as citizens—in the growth and development of our companies and as applied to the growth and development of ourselves as humans and as an evolving society. And, just as with farming, if we care for the soil and harvest properly, we produce value. If we overwork or overtax the farm and add too many pesticides over too much irrigation, the outputs will be limited and potentially dangerous.

Farmers who strive to perfect this process and to learn from the successes and failures of each year’s harvest enjoy financial stability and wealth creation. They work hard to control the variables that are in their power and develop contingency plans around the variables that they can’t control. They see the crops as an extension of themselves and are happy as they see them grow and progress. They enjoy the process and connect with the land in a spiritual way. But at the very core and soul of their existence is the relationship between themselves and their land and between their tools and their seeds and between the quality of their harvest and the dynamics of the marketplace.

In building companies and fostering innovation, we must all embrace these same principles. We must put conditions in place that support a corporate culture likely to yield a productive harvest and be constantly planting the seeds of creativity, encouragement, curiosity, empathy, respect, challenge, and fulfillment. We must understand which tools will be most effective for reinforcing the underlying principles of this culture. We must take steps to manage the conditions that are within our control and develop Plan Bs for those that we can’t. Most important, we must fully invest in the growth and development of our human capital by providing education and training to our teams at all levels to teach them how to become farmers inside our companies and in their own lives.