Scale: The Universal Laws of Life and Death in Organisms, Cities and Companies

by Geoffrey West

Over this immense spectrum, life uses essentially the same basic building blocks and processes to create an amazing variety of forms, functions, and dynamical behaviors. This is a profound testament to the power of natural selection and evolutionary dynamics. All of life functions by transforming energy from physical or chemical sources into organic molecules that are metabolized to build, maintain, and reproduce complex, highly organized systems. This is accomplished by the operation of two distinct but closely interacting systems: the genetic code, which stores and processes the information and “instructions” to build and maintain the organism, and the metabolic system, which acquires, transforms, and allocates energy and materials for maintenance, growth, and reproduction.

In general, it is meaningless to quote the value of a measured length without stating the scale of the resolution used to make it.

In other words, you stop growing because of the mismatch between the way maintenance and supply scale as size increases.

And the theory tells us why: growth is primarily determined by how energy is delivered to cells, and this is constrained by universal properties of networks that transcend design. Among the many other aspects of growth that can be derived from the theory, it predicts how the allocation of metabolic energy between maintenance and growth changes with age.

Our effective metabolic rate is now one hundred times greater than what it was when we were truly “biological” animals, and this has had huge consequences for our recent life history.

So at the critical cellular level cells suffer systematically less damage at a slower rate the larger the animal, and this results in a correspondingly longer life span.

He speculated that this apparent universality has its origins in the evolution of the cognitive structure of the brain: we simply do not have the computational capacity to manage social relationships effectively beyond this size. This suggests that increasing the group size beyond this number will result in significantly less social stability, coherence, and connectivity, ultimately leading to its disintegration. For situations where group identity and cohesiveness are perceived as central for the group to function successfully, recognizing this limitation and the broader implications of social network structure is clearly of great importance.

And even if some of this were available, we need to have it across the entire size range of companies. Furthermore, it is not at all clear that the “official” organizational charts of companies represents the actuality of what the real operational network structures are. Who is really communicating with whom, how often are they doing it, how much do they exchange, and so on? What is really needed is access to all of the company’s communication channels, such as the phone calls, the e-mails, the meetings, et cetera, quantified analogously to the

cell phone data we used for helping to develop a science of cities. It’s unlikely such comprehensive data exist and even less likely that we would ever gain ready access to them. Companies are quite wary of exposing themselves to outside investigators unless they are paying them exorbitant consultant fees, presumably so that they can maintain control. But if you want to understand how a company really functions, or want to develop a serious science of companies, then this is the kind of data that is ultimately needed.

Consequently, we don’t have a well-developed mechanistic framework analogous to the network-based theory for organisms and to a lesser extent cities for analytically understanding the dynamics and structure of companies and, in particular, for calculating the values of their exponents. Nevertheless, just as we have been able to construct a theory of their growth trajectories,...

Companies typically operate as highly constrained top-down organizations that strive to increase efficiency of production and minimize operational costs so as to maximize profits.

The great challenge for companies is how to balance the positive feedback from market forces, which strongly encourage staying with “tried and true” products versus the long-term strategic need to develop new areas and commodities that may be risky and won’t give immediate return.

happy to stay almost entirely with their major successes while the going is good because these “guarantee” short-term returns. Consequently, they tend toward becoming more and more unidimensional. This reduction in diversity coupled with the predicament described earlier in which companies sit near a critical point is a classic indicator of reduced resilience and a recipe for eventual disaster.

Continuous adaptation, not equilibrium, is the rule.

Even though the growth of organisms, cities, and economies follows essentially identical mathematical equations, their resulting solutions have subtle but crucial differences arising from one being driven by sublinear scaling (the economies of scale of organisms) and the other by superlinear scaling (the increasing returns to scale of cities and economies): in the superlinear case, the general solution exhibits an unexpectedly curious property technically known as a finite time singularity,