I was home sick the other day with an awful sinus headache and stomach flu.
About the only bright side was that I got to watch [Battlestar Galactica](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battlestar_Galactica_%28re-imagining%29) on DVD.
I thought to myself, “Boy this is a really great show. It’s a shame they never put it on NBC in the summer as was rumored on the Internet.”
Then I caught myself. Here I am enjoying a fine, fine television show — the visual and dramatic equivalent of a fine [bourbon](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knob_Creek_(bourbon)) or scotch — and yet I somehow think it’s a shame it wasn’t put on an over-the-air network for mass consumption.
Which got me wondering — *does human nature, at its very core, conflict with what is sometimes good business sense?*
[Humans](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human) are **social animals**. It’s one of the characteristics of our species the enables us to do so much good, and harm.
Allow me to list some common business idioms that fit within that framework:
* Grow a larger audience
* Add more employees
* Add more clients
* Attract more investors
And yet there are *plenty* of times and plenty of *businesses* that could probably have been better served by:
* Focusing on a tight, niche audience
* Keeping the same number of staff and enabling them to work smarter/harder
* Keeping the same number of clients and improving quality or revenue-per-client
* Stayed self-funded, or not gone public and avoided the associated detrimental market pressures that come with those “growth” routes.
Nothing terribly insightful here, I suppose.
Just got me wondering if that primal instinct to grow/expand our social network — even cloaked in a business setting — leads us to judge the first set of points as “sexy” and the others as “wimpy.”
