Cedric’s Billion-Dollar Ant Farm

Cedric Yau is one of a handful of geniuses I know.

In our most recent conversation, Cedric opened my eyes to a truth I had not previously encountered, but it reinforced everything I know about ad campaigns and it’s about to make Cedric a billion dollars.

I’m not exaggerating.

You’ve seen long lines of ants carrying food back to their hives, right? So where is the centralized intelligence that brings such sophisticated synchronization to their actions? If you dig even a little bit, the mystery of ant behavior moves very quickly from interesting to miraculous to intoxicatingly impossible.

Consider: You and I are more than 1,800 times as tall as the ants that live in our yards. The mowed grass through which they walk would be for us a jungle 600 feet high. A single ant colony forages for food each day across an area that would be 1,156 square miles for you and me.

Here’s the zinger: If you and I and all our friends are scattered across 1,156 square miles and one of us finds some food, how does that one notify the rest of us who are scattered across 1,156 square miles? Ants have no telepathy, telephones or radios and there are no bosses to give them instructions.

But they do have 3 unifying principles that synchronize the entire colony.

Does your business have unifying principles?

Viewed in high speed at the macro level, ant behavior seems to be guided by chaos theory as their movements create a pattern too vast for the unaided mind to comprehend. But when mapped on a computer, what at first appeared to be randomness becomes a beautiful fractal image built upon the unifying principles of self-similarity.

Fractal images are maps of highly organized chaotic systems and their patterns seem to mirror the behavior of the stock exchange and population fluctuations and chemical reactions. Using chaotic math, computers today are producing images that look exactly like the beauty found in nature… ferns and clouds and snowflakes and bacteria. These maps can also resemble mountains and the human brain and the frost that forms on a windowpane.

Ant behavior goes from intoxicatingly impossible to seductively predictable when the principles that bring an ant colony into unity are reverse-engineered. Here are the ingredients of ant-magic:

1. If you find food, take some home and leave a scented trail.

2. If you find a trail, follow it and add to the scent. If that trail leads you back to the hive, turn around and follow it the other direction.

3. If you don’t know where food is and you don’t where a trail is, wander.

That’s what the miracle of the ant-line looks like when you reduce it down to its unifying principles.

But Cedric wasn’t studying ants so that he could better understand advertising or team motivation. Cedric has an altogether different use for these insights. My closing words to Brother Yau were these: “Based on what you’ve told me, it should take about 2 years for you to quietly put one billion dollars into your bank account.”

“That’s right.”

“My suggestion is to then publish exactly what you did and how you did it. Spend a few months being interviewed on talk shows and then come and teach a class at Wizard Academy.”

“That’s exactly what I had in mind.”

We’ll keep you posted.

Roy H. Williams