Be Like The Borg
Resistance Is Futile
By Paul Grimsley
Strength is irrelevant. Resistance is futile. We wish to improve ourselves. We will add your biological and technological distinctiveness to our own. Your culture will adapt to service ours.
For some reason, as things do — it suddenly struck me this morning that the Borg maybe weren’t so bad after all, and their philosophy is also not that terrible. In fact, if you pay close attention, their whole mission is not dissimilar to The Federation, just a little more direct.
The disagreement between the Federation and the Borg isn’t necessarily a philosophical one so much as a methodological one. But if you took the ideas posited in the quote above and applied them to your company you might do well. The Federation seemingly co-opts whatever tech and expertise they have, where as the Borg take it and make it their own.
Borg do not consider giving technology away, only assimilating it.
Of course I am setting aside the obvious problem with the fact that they inject you with nanites and erase your personality, or at least suppress it, before anyone feels the need to point out the obvious problems with a company emulating this tactic.
I am in no way recommending that you turn people into mindless drones controlled by a queen through the interface of a hive mind — this I am sure contravenes employment law, even if it isn’t specifically addressed to the cyborg problem.
But I like the notion that Strength is Irrelevant, for marketing purposes you could take that to mean that it is the intellect that counts. Smart marketing over perhaps the muscle your bigger competitors bring to the table.
You want to persist, and have people unable to resist your marketing flow, so Resistance is futile, also works really well. You want to create irresistible marketing that totally handles and smooths away all possible objection.
We wish to improve ourselves. Yes, who doesn’t? This should be a cornerstone of anyone’s personal philosophy, and definitely a company that wants to help people and expand.
We will add your biological and technological distinctiveness to our own. I think the technological aspect is the one to focus on here — and in a marketing context I take it to mean that you want to learn from other people’s technology what you can. We are actually just going to ignore the biological aspect of this part of the quote — unless you are in some weird niche market, this is, like strength, irrelevant.
Your culture will adapt to service ours. OK, so this kind of works — you want to take this like you are Apple and they are going to integrate ever damned thing you produce into their life until it becomes invisible, because it is so integral.
So, there we have it, The Borg Business Philosophy (obviously all the intellectual property rights to any Star Trek characters referred to in this belong to Gene Roddenberry and his estate).
Notice, I did not recommend you model your office on the Borg Cube.
