1. James March, “Exploration and Exploitation in Organizational Learning,” Organization Science 2 (1991): 71–87.

Nest-building-and-destroying weaver birds may seem unusually profligate with energy. But they are by no means the only species besides us inclined to spend energy on apparently pointless work. The avian kingdom alone is blessed with thousands of similar examples of expensive elaboration, from the grandiose plumage of birds of paradise to the over-elaborate nests of bowerbirds.

It is also clear, as the busy-building weavers remind us, that while success or failure in the energy quest will always shape the evolutionary trajectory of any species, many hard-to-explain animal traits and behaviors may well have been shaped by the seasonal overabundance of energy rather than the battle for scarce resources, and that in this may lie a clue as to why we, the most energy-profligate of all species, work so hard.

We also learned what to make harder and slower from works including The Necessity of Friction by Nordal Åkerman, a collection of essays on the virtues of blocking, delaying, and stopping action that draws on fields including economics, organizational theory, physics, and artificial intelligence.

Bibliography

Sennet, R., The Craftsmen, London, Allen Lane, 2008