Ant-type social organization form thinking

Ants are one of the longest-standing species in the world, ants have tenacious vitality, ants are contemporaries of dinosaurs, dinosaurs have long been extinct, and ants have survived; ants live in a very damp and dirty environment, but they rarely get sick, which shows how strong their survival and breeding ability is. The world's oldest, strongest and largest species, such as dinosaurs, have been gone for a long time, while small and micro-species such as rats, mosquitoes, flies, ants, and bees still exist and will always exist. Rats and mosquitoes and other species only have enough to eat and reproduce, there is no specific organizational division of labor, relying only on super reproductive ability and keen ability to find food, to meet only their own individual survival and reproduction, but ants and bees are not the same as them, the survival and reproduction of ants In addition to meeting individual needs, but also consider the common needs of all, and the division of labor and cooperation to complete specific meaningful work in an orderly manner to achieve results. Ants have a long lifespan, with worker ants surviving for a few weeks to 3-10 years, and queens surviving for years or even decades. An ant nest can grow in 1 place for several years or even more than ten years.

Ants are typical of social groups. There are 3 elements of sociality: the ability of individuals of the same species to cooperate in the care of juveniles; a clear division of labor; at least two generations overlapping within the colony, and the ability of the offspring to care for the previous generation for a period of time. The division of labor in the colony is generally 5 levels: queen, female, male, worker and soldier. Some species live in nests of other species, and their larvae are fed by the host's worker ants.

1． Queen: a female with reproductive ability, or a female ant, also known as an ant king, is the largest in the colony, characterized by a large abdomen, developed reproductive organs, short antennae, small thorax, winged, winged or wingless. The main responsibilities are to spawn, reproduce offspring and manage the family.

2． Female ant: a female with reproductive ability after mating, who loses her wings after mating to become a new queen, commonly known as "princess" or "angel".

3． Male ant: Or father ant. The head is small, the upper jaw is underdeveloped, and the antennae are slender. There are well-developed reproductive organs and external genitalia, and the main duty is to mate with the queen ant, commonly known as "prince" or "mosquito".

4． Worker Ants: Also known as worker ants. Wingless, an underdeveloped female, is generally the smallest in the group, but the largest in number. The compound eye is small, and the single eye is very small or non-existent. The palate, antennae, and three pairs of feet are well developed and are good at walking. Worker ants have no reproductive ability. The main duties of worker ants are to build and expand nests, gather food, feed larvae and queens, etc. In order to hibernate, ants eat a lot of food in the fall to store fat in the body, and they do not eat throughout the following winter. Because of this, the worker ants in the colony search for food almost every day to ensure that each member of the colony can eat enough food to withstand the cold winter.

5． Soldier Ants: "Soldier Ants" is a common name for some ant species of large worker ants, and is a female ant that is infertile. The head is large and the palate is developed, which can crush hard food and become a weapon of battle when defending the group.

Ants build a group by starting from the acquaintance and friendship of the sexes through marriage and flight. Fall in love at first sight after acquaintance, and cross the tail during or after the flight. The "bridegroom" does not live long.

The ant died shortly after the tail was crossed, leaving the "widow" queen living alone. The queen takes off her wings and chooses a suitable soil and place to nest underground. She was "alone" and had limited strength, so she could only temporarily build a small room as a safe place and give the "conceived" body a delivery room. After the eggs in the body mature and produce, the small larvae hatch and the queen is busy. Each young ant's food is fed mouth-to-mouth until the young grow into adult ants and can live independently. When the first worker ants grew, they dug holes in the outside world to find food, and then expanded the nest area to provide housing for more and more family members. Since then, the hard-suffering queen has enjoyed the blessings of qingfu and become the commander of this group's large family. Most of the eggs will develop into females, which they are called worker ants; a small number will develop into queens and males. The work of raising and feeding young ants is undertaken by worker ants. But the queen continues to lay eggs to breed large families. Nests come in various forms, with most species nesting in underground soil, digging tunnels, chambers and shelters, and piling up excavated material and leaves near the entrance to form mounds that play a protective role. Some ants use plant leaves, stalks, petioles, etc. to form paper-like nests and hang them on trees or rocks. Other ants live in wooded areas. The smallest colonies have only a few dozen or nearly a hundred ants, and some have thousands of ants, while large groups can have tens of thousands, or even more.

The feeding habits of ants vary greatly from species to species. It can generally be divided into carnivorous, plant-eating and omnivorous ants. Before the onset of the cold, ants carry aphids, mesozoites, horned cicadas and grey butterfly larvae to their nests, ready to draw excrement from these insects for feeding (milk nectar) in the winter; they also carry weed seeds before the arrival of the cold, ready to be sown the following spring.

Ants are using extraordinary survival strategies — planting fungi, harvesting seeds, grazing honey-producing insects, weaving nests, cooperative predation, social parasitism, and slavery — all of which greatly stimulate the curiosity of scientists and the public. The secret to the survival of ants in all corners of the world is that they live in a very organized group. They work together to build nests so that their eggs and offspring can grow safely in them. In the colony, queens are the only breeding offspring who can lay eggs. It is the mother of all ants in the colony. Worker ants feed it, cleanse their bodies, and take their eggs to another place to take care of.

Ants are highly social insects, communicating with each other through pheromones emitted by the body, when ants find food, they will spread pheromones on the food, and the receptors on the antennae of other ants can recognize signals, and they will instinctively drag the pheromones back into the hole.

So what can we learn from the analysis and observation of the organizational form of ants?

1. The organizational form of ants can be defined as, in the words of teacher Wang Liming, as follows: a group of sentient and intentional people do a valuable and meaningful thing together; what they do is more complicated than the task completed by a single ant. Each of these individuals is free, they have their own free will, and at the same time they are organized in various ways to accomplish all kinds of major things;

2) To build a very tight and loyal social structure, it is necessary to carry out and do meaningful things. First of all, to solve the problem of survival, for ants, one of the problems of survival is reproduction, one is food, the function of reproduction is completed by the queen, the juvenile ants in the ant nest serve it, the male ants continue to help reproduce, the external ants are worker ants (females) constantly obtain food, and undertake the function of nesting and defense, juvenile ants will continue to grow into worker ants, supplement the loss of worker ants or increase the strength of worker ants, because only by being able to get more food can we supply more small ants, male ants and queens;

3. In a sense, the mission of allowing your ant colony to reproduce is like the mission and vision of the human social organization, so what are the values of the ants? What makes all ants willing to consciously divide their work and work? It is to make a single ant always feel that it is difficult to survive and continue their own life when they only rely on their own ability, the queen also controls all the worker ants (females) to develop their genitals by secreting a special odor, and only when the queen disappears, or because the colony is too large and food shortage, the queen suspends the secretion of this special smell, so that the worker ants who are likely to have children "marry and fly", take away a part of the worker ants, and independently establish a new colony family. Therefore, the ant individuals in the colony admit on the one hand that they must rely on everyone to survive before they have obtained reproductive rights, and that helping the queen to survive and reproduce is to help herself survive and reproduce This behavioral consciousness is determined by its genetic genes. The DNA inheritance rate of ants is 75%, which is greater than that of other species where females mate, and it should be said that it is mainly due to the problem of inbreeding. That is, the organization (queen) decides what members should do when they are born, what they should not do, born male ants, they have been contributing sperm mating, no need to work, born as female ants, minors will be arranged to do housekeeping work to maintain the normal order of life in the ant nest, and when they become adults, they will change to field work, that is, obtain food, defense, nesting, moving and other work. Queens can control the fertility ratio of male and female ants to achieve dynamic balance, and the proportion of females is generally relatively high. This is the division of duties in social organizations.

4. How do individual ant individuals cooperate and identify enemies and us? Ants distinguish between friend and foe through a co-creation behavior. This co-creation behavior is a common smell, which is composed of odors created by the queen of a particular colony, land, food, water and nest, and all individual colony individuals. Smelling like-minded people are their own people, otherwise they are enemies, and they have to fight or avoid. This odor has formed in the nest before it is underage. After ants have a common home and a common smell, how do worker ants work together to find food and carry it home? Ants must first have the ability to fight alone, this ability includes randomly looking for food, positioning and secreting notification information of the three important abilities, so that when randomly finding food, can nibble a piece of food while eating, while secretion, through the azimuth positioning ability to take the food straight home, when the nearby ants randomly smell the smell of food secretion, they will find food along the travel route of the ants that find food, and then secrete the same smell on the same path. In this way, more ants can find this piece of food, and then form a clear path to carry the team. When the food is too large or cannot be slowly nibbled down to take home, or when the weather is bad and needs to be taken home (the ants will make decisions through their own senses and judgment of light and humidity), the ants will continue to gather and then work together to transport the food away. When it realizes that its direction is wrong (perhaps because its strength does not play a smooth role, but when it pushes itself), it will withdraw from this direction, find another place to work hard in another direction, and keep it strong, so that more ants will participate in the right direction of handling from the joint effort, and finally arrive home. So for the organization of human society, how to design such rules to make all employees think in one place, to make efforts in one place, and not necessarily need central command? Thinking in one place is that everyone should be willing to go out and find "food", and everyone should have the ability to find food and take it home and tell others to carry it together. The "food" to be found is those customers or consumers who need our goods and services, our sales staff is these worker ants, the sales staff should have the ability to find customers or consumers, and how to bring customer demand information back to the company (customer screening), and then gather all the company's resources to dig out more customer needs or get more customer resources here. That is, when you are already serving a large customer, you need everyone to work hard to serve this customer well and tap more needs. When we find a new customer, but also want everyone to eat this customer together, and jointly serve this customer, this process of information exchange and transmission is very important, you have to tell more people the customer's information, otherwise others will not be able to help you, everyone can not work together. In other words, for the company, the service to existing customers (that is, when the goal is clear) requires everyone to work together, work together, and constantly obtain more "food" resources that we need. For the goal is not clear, that is, we do not know where another customer is, for sales, it is to train more salespeople with strong individual combat capabilities, so that they have to go around every day to find "food" sources, when they find customers or consumers, and gather all the resources of the company to attack this customer, or eat all the consumers in this area. And these sales staff in the running market, must have an understanding of the company's various links or departments of the work process and job settings, we can become a group of people with the same values through common getting along and communicating, under the guidance of the company's common mission and vision, under the influence of the common corporate culture, together to find more customers, serve more customers, build the whole big family, have more like-minded colleagues and friends, but also to achieve the survival and self-development goals of each employee.

5. Therefore, a company organization should establish a common mission and vision that everyone recognizes and understands, as well as formulate a corporate culture and values that are suitable for the survival and development needs of the enterprise itself. Which values or behaviors can help enterprises to achieve survival and development, which can not even play a negative role, it must be clear, good must be vigorously promoted and praised, bad must be prohibited and punished, and to maintain open and dynamic updates, constantly enrich and optimize the company's values, and finally form a suitable for the survival and development of enterprises corporate culture IP, can attract more people with similar smells to join, but also make more customers trust us, willing to cooperate with us for a win-win situation. Therefore, internally, what kind of employees should be valued and praised, how employees should get along and cooperate with each other, externally, how the company's personnel treat customers, and continue to gain the trust and recognition of customers, is the company's culture and values need to be designed and shaped content and requirements.

6, secondly, the company should become a sales or service-oriented organization, because only in this way can we continuously obtain "food" from the outside world, can we support the organization and its members, and can we realize the mission and vision of the enterprise. Then sales or service becomes the primary task, the first is to find customers, the premise of finding customers is that salespeople are willing to go to the market to find and dig, stimulate their willingness and promote collaboration between colleagues has become an important part of organizational design and management. Only when the salesperson finds the customer and brings the customer back to the company, and the salesperson who finds the customer gets the corresponding reward, the salesperson has the continuous motivation and willingness to continue to look for the customer. However, to "eat" customers and become permanent service objects, become the company can tap the demand for a long time, must rely on all the company's resources and members of the collaborative efforts to do, which requires the company's product taste, variety, quality and cost, plan management, distribution services and after-sales service, financial settlement services and other responsible departments to cooperate in order to do, because the customer needs is a comprehensive service results, any of which cause customer dissatisfaction the occurrence of problems will have a negative impact, Even losing customers. When customers successfully become our long-term service objects, the entire company has continuous income, which produces performance performance, and the results of performance performance should be given to each member in proportion, so as to generate continuous motivation and willingness. If the organizational incentive design is appropriate, it can produce sustainable effects and automatically promote the company's business cycle development, that is, sales staff are more and more willing to find customer resources, the more prospective customers, more and more customers who successfully cooperate, the more market demand, the more orderly and efficient the production and distribution service organization in the in-house, the lower and lower cost. On the other hand, if the salesperson is not willing to go out to find a customer, or after finding a customer, as long as one department in the team is not willing to collaborate to "eat" the customer, or there is no incentive to continue to serve the customer, the salesperson will not get more rewards, and other members of the team will not have the motivation to participate in the collaboration, then a negative circular effect will be formed, and the results can be imagined. That company has the responsibility to give employees a variety of better individual combat and cooperation capabilities and tools, that is, what kind of qualities and capabilities the company wants the sales staff to have, how to find such employees, how to train employees to improve their ability to go out quickly and efficiently to find customers, so that the company team has the ability to efficiently cooperate with customers, and the ability to continue to serve customers, what kind of systems and processes the enterprise designs, and corporate culture, what kind of tools to promote teamwork and help achieve results. That is, the company empowers employees, and employees take performance for the company.

——Shanrun, October 14, 2021