TIME for a quick trip down memory lane. Today I have an article published in The Sunday Times, my journalistic alma mater, and it’s been at least 10 years since I have written a piece for them. The occasion is to mark 50 years of the launch of the Sunday Times Business News section. I was asked, as former Technology Correspondent, to write a piece of the top ten technologies that have most changed the world in the last 50 years.

Well, – I did my bit. But the problem with writing for newspapers is the annoying reality that they usually only commission you to write what they want their readers to read. Sometimes you can break through with a new idea, but generally it’s a world where section editors are second-guessing the prejudices and appetites of editors, whose minds are focused on what will sell and what their proprietors might like to see in print. At least, that’s how it was and I suspect still is.

The business piece that I would really have liked to have written has nothing to do with technology that has changed the world. Rather, it is to do with the fascinating parallels I keep finding between what makes a successful person and a successful business.

Of course, defining a successful person is a matter of great subjective debate. It is not, to my mind, about how much money they earn, or if they have a title or some other decoration. Nor is it to do with ‘good works’, as such. Rather, it is the extent to which they are able to learn and adapt and then communicate their learning and adaptations to others in useful, inspiring and meaningful ways, since, as we all know, the only constant anyone can be sure of is…. change. With that benchmark in mind, the organ of most importance is, naturally, the human brain.

The only constant anyone can be sure of is…. change.

So what happens if we try to take a model of the most functional – successful – human brain and see to what extent it maps that onto successful business organisations. Well, that’s what I just tried to do on my walk in the Kent countryside with Flossie the dog just now, and the conclusion we reached was rather intriguing.

I took as my successful business, the one I knew so well all those years ago when I was writing regularly for The Sunday Times – News Corporation.

I actually even got know Rupert Murdoch a little bit in those years. One hysterical and highly memorable episode was being flown from London to San Gimgnano, in Italy, on the News Corp corporate jet.

Rupert had taken a huge villa there and was holding court with all his senior executives for a month  - a working honeymoon (his third, so far).  I was one half of a two-person team tasked with presenting a business plan for a new online venture. We spent an hour or so talking it through, sitting next to Rupert on a sofa in the summerhouse by the swimming pool. He seemed to like it. Rather, he seemed to like us, which is how most of his decisions were made. So, after a quick call to the Newscorp finance director, Dave Devoe, we got our funding, as requested – a cool £17m.

We spent an hour or so talking it through, sitting next to Rupert on a sofa in the summerhouse by the swimming pool.

So, I am thinking, how is it that Newscorp has grown into one of the most successful businesses in the world? Of course, the phone hacking scandal has taken the sheen off the business recently (bizarrely, Andy Coulson was drafted into alongside myself and another to help run the new online venture long before he became editor of the News of the World or David Cameron’s media advisor). But still, it’s about 50 years since Rupert Murdoch bought The Times and The Sunday Times – and in that time this legendary media mogul has built a stunningly successful global media enterprise – the perfect subject, you would have thought, for scrutiny in the newspaper’s 50-year anniversary celebrations today…

At the risk of grotesque over simplification, a good functioning brain, well adapted for survival in a changing dynamic natural environment, seems to use two different but complimentary operating modes – one to focus on the crucial near-term issues of feeding and breeding (left hemisphere) leaving the other (right hemisphere) to keep a look out for changes in the environment  – such as the shadow of an impending predator (see Wallbook Weekly, The Divided Brain).

What I now realise is that Rupert Murdoch’s corporate structure for News Corp almost exactly mirrors this dual operating dynamic.

The newspapers were traditionally cash-cows, tightly managed and focused (left hemisphere) on generating huge levels of income. This money was then removed from these cash-generative operating businesses and passed to a central business development function based in New York. These were the guys on the look out (right hemisphere) – judging how the business environment was changing and seeing how its cash reserves could be invested in future businesses that would potentially compete, or one day replace, the traditional businesses of delivering daily news on paper.

News Corp’s right hemisphere masterstroke was to invest the newspaper’s money in Sky TV – a decision the newspapers would never have made themselves, so obsessed were they in their own world of print, ink and paper.

So my suggestion is that News Corp’s dual processing system for dealing with a dynamic, changing business’ world is based (unwittingly I am sure) on the very same model that nature has evolved to maximize the chances of individual survival in the wild.

Critically, connecting these two hemispheres is a thin band of tissue known as the corpus callosum – and that’s where Rupert and his phone calls to the financial director, come in. Rupert himself was the connective tissue between two warring hemispheres. That was / is his leadership genius. One side generating cash, the other taking it and spending it on new ventures some of which thrive and some of which perish in the dynamic, always changing business world.

Of course how News Corp will fare when, as eventually must happen, its founder and leader departs this life, who knows? A brain without the connective corpus callosum has severe limitations, although it can still function. Nevertheless, a study of Rupert Murdoch, as a kind of Corporate Callosum, just further underpins my suspicion that businesses  – and business leaders – would do well to get out of the boardroom and into the wild to study the well-honed survival strategies of Mother Nature.