Of feral cats and pet cats

Abstract

arly last summer an article in our local newspaper caught my eye. Some well-deserved visibility was given to my friend, Dick Warner (Professor Emeritus of Natural Resources and Environmental Sciences), for the findings arising from his study of ferali and pet cats. Dick and his colleagues attached radio transmitters to the cats to track their activity levels and roaming patterns in great detail. Of particular interest to me was that they observed a marked difference in the activity level and roaming range between these two categories of cats, with the ferals being highly active nearly five times more often than the pets and one feral covering an area several hundred times that of the average pet.ii At first blush my reaction was that the result was not entirely surprising. Feral cats, with no regular, reliable source of food available to them, would naturally range more actively and widely in search of sustenance. Pets, on the other hand, had no need to do so and, thus, would likely lazily stay closer to the hand that fed them. This fit nicely with a metaphor for the curiosity, motivation and perseverance of corporate employees and entrepreneurs, I thought, something along the lines of the business parable, “Who Moved My Cheese?”iii Entrepreneurs rely only on their ability to bring a product successfully to market in order to put food on their table. Many corporate employees, in contrast, very willingly accept protection from such discipline of the marketplace and survive comfortably on a regular stream of paychecks from their employer. Having said this, I sensed that something might be missing. Were there instances where the pet cats did, in fact, roam just as widely as the ferals? If so, under what conditions and circumstances was this observed? Answers to these two questions had the potential to truly complete the metaphor, since if a small number of pets behaved as ferals, we also would be able to account for the few, but exceptional individuals in corporations who are breakthrough innovators – those who exhibit a high degree of curiosity, motivation and perseverance in the face of challenges. The importance of these traits to their “connecting the dots” lay in the fact that the best innovators are active and roam widely in their curiosity; it is how they gather the “dots” that they later “connect.” With that, I emailed Dick and set up a time to meet with him over coffee to probe him a bit further than what I could pick up from the newspaper account alone. About ten days later, as we discussed his observations derived from this and a number of earlier, yet related detailed studies he had conducted over several decades, Dick provided me with the missing piece in the puzzle. While none of the feral cats had been neutered, nearly every pet cat had been. He had, in fact, observed a consistent pattern of exceptional wandering from within the pet cat category – from the pets that had not been neutered! The metaphor now had a new, yet unfortunate, richness to it. It was not only the presence or lack of food that made the difference between the two categories of cats, as if it were merely a matter of how content they were or how motivated they needed to be in order to survive. Instead, something more profound and disturbing was at the root of it. The neutered pet cats simply had the drive taken out of them! If the metaphor held, the pet cats still represented corporate employees, but now distinguished into two subcategories: (1) the neutered pet cats, having no drive to leave home, represented those employees who had lost their will to appropriately search for new ideas and challenge the system, and (2) the non-neutered pet cats, retaining their drive while being provided for by their owner, represented those employees who could still venture forth and be “insubordinate above and beyond the call of duty,” making significant things happen for customer and company alike.