Consider this lesson in strategy. In 1934, Professor G.F. Gause of Moscow University, known as “the father of mathematical biology,” published the results of a set of experiments in which he put two very small animals (protozoans) of the same genus in a bottle with an adequate supply of food. If the animals were of different species, they could survive and persist together. If they were of the same species, they could not. This observation led to Gause’s Principle of Competitive Exclusion: No two species can coexist that make their living in the identical way.
A version of this article appeared in the November–December 1989 issue ofHarvard Business Review.
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Bruce D. Henderson is professor of management at Vanderbilt University’s Owen Graduate School of Management. He is also the founder and chairman emeritus of the Boston Consulting Group and has written extensively on business strategy. His most recent book isThe Logic of Business Strategy (Ballinger, 1985).
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