It's Alive!

If you remember nothing else about this reading through this site, I hope you will take away this key point.  The starting point for building and growing a healthy business is the recognition that your business is actually alive.  A living thing.  A form of life that has an existence apart from you, and yet is dependent on you for sustenance.

If your business is actually a life form, what exactly is the nature of this “organizational life”?  Here's a compare-and-contrast list of some characteristics of life that apply in different ways to both biological and organizational life:

Both organisms and organizations have the ability to spontaneously emerge from a codified design.  In the case of biological organisms we know that this design is encoded in the DNA molecule.  In the social space, the situation is complicated the interplay of many independent and interdependent minds, as well as codified rules in the form of laws and regulations that have been created and evolved over time to govern the activities and growth of businesses and other organizations

Having once emerged into being, an instance of a life-form has an identity that is maintained over time.  You are you from the time you were born until now, even though you have undergone uncountable changes, and replaced a high percentage of the cells in your body several times over.  Even if you change your name, you remain you, as the same identifiable self.  This provides interesting comparisons with organizational life-forms.  The organization remains the same identifiable organization, even as its participating members come and go.   The identity of an organization can remain surprisingly resilient.  We see this situation over and over in acquisitions of one business by another.  The name change of the one is not enough to change its identity overnight, and we see how often the effort to truly change the identity of the acquired business lead to pain, and even failure to achieve the desired results.  Maybe you’ve lived through one of these events, and can testify to the difficulty?  Some organizations have endured over very long time periods.  Think of the Catholic Church, which has maintained its identity for centuries as an organization, an institution, and yes, even a business.

Every living being has a boundary and is embedded in an environment.  In the case of the biological entity, the boundary is a skin, with elaborations like hair, feathers, a shell, etc.  For a business, the boundary is not so clear-cut, but you can probably think of how this works.  There is likely information that is guarded as proprietary.  There are facilities (offices, warehouses) that are kept under lock and key for protection from intruders.  One of the issues with the living business is that this boundary is not physically self-contained, so it is not as obvious as in the case of a biological life-form, and is consequently complicated to deal with.  This is just one way that organizational life becomes much more complicated than biological life.  

Every living system attempts to maintain a level of stability within flows of material, energy, and information.  Too little food or water, and the organism will die.  At the same time, too much water, and a land-dwelling organism will drown.  For an organization, being cut off from a key source of supply can jeopardize its viability, as can a lack of cash flow.  At the same time, when a flow becomes overpowering, it can upset the stability to the point that the living entity disintegrates.   Fortunately for us in this time of information explosion, information flows are not usually directly fatal.  But they can be disruptive, and disorienting, which can be unhealthy conditions, which through distraction can lead to injury or death from other forces. 

A characteristic of all biological and social living systems concerns the balance between independence and interdependence.  Both animals and plants depend on nutrients, water and light to varying degrees.  They also depend upon other species in their ecosystems as a food, pollinate, and break down waste.  In this regard, humans as organisms have taken great leaps forward in independence through the inventiveness and skill of making tools and shaping environments that take relatively independent control of providing the conditions required for life within otherwise very hostile conditions.  However, to accomplish, for instance, life in outer space, people depend significantly on other people, effectively substituting one form of dependence for another.  This explains our focus on relatively stable (dependable) groups.  From the organizational perspective, those groups, in turn develop both dependencies, and independence of their own.  For instance, a startup company is initially totally dependent on its founder(s), but over time becomes founder-independent, while still depending on a growing set of skills, as well as resources of many kinds.  A company that remains dependent on the founder challenges the health of itself and the founder as well.

Biological life and organizational life also both involve balancing between cooperation and competition.  The ecosystem view of organisms points to competition for the basics of life, but also the symbiosis of lichens (relationship between algae and fungi), corals and their associated algae, the complex ecosystem of the human gut, and many other species.  Organizations also exist within complex webs of cooperation and competition.  You don't have to have been business for very long to sense the truth of this.  Competition is a fact of life, and sometimes comes from the most unlikely sources.  But at the same time we live in an increasingly open and interlinked world, with partners and service providers in every area where a business leader may need help.

Finally, for every form of life. both biological and social, we can see a very basic lifecycle: emergence, sustainment, and ultimately disintegration.  The issue of sustaining business life leads to consideration of a range of services that you need in order to maintain your healthy business.  So first, let's take a close look at sustainment.

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