Toddler Strategies for Business Success

It’s every parent’s biggest worry: am I responsible for spawning the antichrist?

The period when your conviction that your little darling is not - in fact - the Beast of Revelation come to bring about a reign of terrible darkness across the world is really put to the test is commonly known as the “Terrible Twos”.

A more accurate description would of course be “childhood, taken as a whole”.

This may be overstating things. I speak not from personal experience here – the eldest of my own brood is but a fiveling – but from that tried-and-tested mix of bigoted exaggeration, wilful blindness to nuance and deliberate trolling which is the hallmark of blogging.

As Marx said in his Theses on Feuerbach:

The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.

From a philosophical point of view, I am pretty sure that I have got the whole of toddler psychology worked out.

Unfortunately, I have yet to ascertain how put the crucial insight - “they always work out what will wind you up the most, and then do it” - into action.

Toddler reasoning is essentially unanswerable. There is no reasonable response to hyperventilation, uncontrollable crying or just shouting "BUT I WANT IT!"

I am surprised then that, given their mastery in manipulating human behaviour, no one seems to have seized on the business strategy applications of leading successful toddlers.

Why go through a long and delicate negotiation when a public tantrum has been proven time and time again to get you what you want?

Or suppose you have botched a big client presentation – why not blame your sibling?

Remember, there is no question or challenge that can’t be answered with “but he did x, y, z first ” once you have given up on the idea that you are inhibited by:

• The need for things to be true; or
• The need for parts of your overall argument to have any relation to one another or the point you are defending.

I can’t believe that more toddlers are not leading FTSE 100 companies, given that like most CEOs they are, at heart, innumerate psychopaths.