I like to tell my 3 year old stories that are loosely based on Russian Folk Stories that I found in this book. I take down the gore as much as possible and generally try to shift the jobs that people do to be a little more appropriate for modern times (and make the animals more fit for the desert, where we live).
On story I love to tell is based on "The Tale of Tsar Saltan". In this story, a young man (Gvidon) ends up distant and unknown to his father (Tsar Saltan). He helps out a swan, who turns out to be a magic princess and who falls in love with him and does him all sorts of favors. Every time Gvidon sneaks back to his father's castle in the form of a fly, he comes back with a request for some new and crazy thing that he heard about there. One example is this one:
"After he flew back to the island, Gvidon told the swan the story he heard about the remarkable squirrel. Then the prince walked into his courtyard and, lo and behold, there was the singing squirrel, sitting under a fir tree, cracking golden nuts! The prince rejoiced at this and ordered that a crystal house be built for the little animal. He placed a guard there to stand watch and ordered a scribe to record every shell. Profit for the prince, honor for the squirrel!"
Basically, he found himself in possession of a magic squirrel/tree combination. The tree produced golden nuts (each of which held a ruby inside) and the singing squirrel would go up and collect them, take them down and crack them and stack the riches up in piles.
The part that I love about this story is that Gvidon doesn't just take the riches, he then builds a completely non-value-added organization around those riches. He establishes a completely superfluous crystal house for the squirrel, he organizes and accounting department to keep score and establishes a management structure that watches the whole thing happen.
When I tell the story, I keep going. The guards need management, so an executive structure is organized. The accounting department eventually branches out into strategy and financial analysis and grows headcount. Eventually there are organizations built up around selling the rubies and the gold on international markets. The organization continues to get bigger and bigger and bigger until eventually the tree and the squirrel are at the bottom of the hierarchy, getting bossed around by MBAs and seasoned executives who have been in this business for years. By the end, Gvidon's entire income is consumed by the organization.
How many times does this happen in the real world? A start-up comes out with a great business concept and develops a product that is worth buying. People value the services or the experience and the company starts to take off. The need to scale and they take on investors, who want to track progress. Before you know it, it's "Gvidon's Squirrel."
(if you're interested in reading the whole story, I found an online copy here, which is where I found that picture, too.
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