View Finder's flower power.

I grew up around flowers. My parents are avid gardeners, and as a small child, I always had a role in the yearly planting of thousands of bulbs and flowering shrubs. And given the bustling nature of our neighborhood garden supply store, I'm fairly certain I'm not alone in this experience.

Flowers always represented a sense of beautiful accomplishment at my house. But aren't the flowers themselves really the ones accomplishing something? They are, despite the lackluster planting efforts of children and the black-thumbed efforts of adults (like me), growing and thriving in all corners of the world. But why is that?

After some Google searching and head scratching, I found my answer. In a fantastic elementary science lesson published online, the teacher wrote, "The job of a flower is to help its pollinator put pollen exactly in the right place at the right time to make a seed. When a plant’s flower succeeds at this, the plant gets to pass the secret for this success to the next generation... through evolution." Flowers thrive, because at their basic genetic levels, they are evolutionaries.

Evolution is something we value here at Play. So apply floral thought to business: In today's leading businesses, who are the evolutionaries? Who are the businesses and leaders that are thriving? How are they doing exactly the right thing at exactly the right time? What does it take to evolve?