Frog Effect,温水煮青蛙

Frog Effect

In the19th centuries, Cornell University conducted a famous experiment on frogs. The experts put a frog into the boiling water and the frog jumped out of the boiling water right away. Then, another frog was put into cold water, which was gradually boiled. Surprisingly, it didn’t jump out of the water immediately although it could feel the increase of the temperature. At length, the frog was boiled to death before it could get out. This is the origin of the so called frog effect. According to experts, it is the sense of crisis that have significant effects on whether the frog can survive. In other words, frog effect means that if people lack the sense of crisis, they are bound to suffer losses and pay the price.

Nowadays, the frog effect is widely applied to company management. There’s no denying that the environment for company development are changing rapidly. As a result, the leaders of the company must have the sense of crisis, which entails the leaders not to be trapped in the past or current success. Bill Gates once said that Microsoft would go bankrupt in 18 months. Definitely, he has a strong sense of crisis though Microsoft isalready one of the most successful companies in the world. Everything is changing, thus companies have to be sensitive to the surroundings and keep up with the pace of times. What is more important is that the crises are also coming into being in a long process. Many severe crises attribute to initiative small problems which finally get in the way of the development of the company. Thus taking the frog effect into consideration, companies need to deal with the small problems properly and carefully.

Frog effect is never far away from us. Most of us get into bad habits unconsciously. For instance, those who are addicted to taking drugs begin taking drugs out of curiosity. Neither do they realize that the effects caused by addiction are deadly, nor deado they understand the suffering of resisting the temptation of drugs. Once they become aware of the severe effects, they have been addicted to drugs and suffered from undesirable consequences.

Based on my illustration above, we can never emphasize too much the practical meaning of frog effect though this effect itself is well-known. And to avoid being boiled like a frog, we’d better equip ourselves with the sense of crisis.

Group Members: Huang Qiaoli

Liu Kun

MengLingtao