3 Business Lessons From the World of Biology Companies and living creatures grow in eerily similar ways. These lessons from nature can help you thrive-and avoid disruption.

Business leaders are often fascinated by military tactics, and with understandable reason: They see themselves as waging battle against challenging incumbents and evading minefields in the marketplace. But there is a radically different, equally important way of understanding business — and it often goes overlooked. It is the way business mimics biology.

Bruce Henderson, the late founder of Boston Consulting Group (BCG), wrote about this concept in 1989. He insisted that a plan of attack created purely through logic and imagination was insufficient to win in the real world. A successful strategy had to recognize the complex web of natural competition and laws of nature that govern competitive advantages of all species —­ including people, who compete primarily with each other through commerce.

Fast-forward a few decades. Our collective knowledge of biology has improved, and we now know more about what governs natural competitive advantages in a variety of species. As an innovator looking to unseat incumbents, you should study these natural rules of the game — and take them into account in most of your plans. In my experience as both an academic and a strategy adviser, I've found the following three biological propensities to be the most relevant when making the right choices around disruptive innovation and competition.

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1. Grow only if you are efficient.

As an animal grows, it requires more food to sustain itself. But how much? A well-­regarded theory called Kleiber's Law, recently popularized by theoretical physicist Geoffrey West, offers a straightforward answer: Every time an animal doubles in size, its metabolic requirement grows by just 1.75 times. Put simply, that means the bigger you are, the more efficiently you can maintain your size.

That has profound business implications — because as it turns out, this ratio is remarkably close to the way successful companies scale. BCG identified this in 1966 with a concept called the "experience curve," which suggests that if you do something more than once, you ought to do it faster and cheaper the next time.

There is an important lesson here for innovative startups hungry for growth. Growth is key to the survival of a company for a multitude of reasons — but it can be a silent killer if done without the counterbalance of incremental efficiency. Many innovative startups as well as established corporations lose sight of this and try to continue growing without asking themselves the basic question: "Does growing make us more efficient at the core of what we do?" Growth here could mean the hiring of more employees, entering new geographies, launching a new product, or merging with another company. Make sure you don't lose sight of this before pursuing the dream of the relentless hockey stick.

2. Optimize for the long term.

One of the bigger mysteries in biology is this: Why do animals reproduce by having sex? After all, simpler organisms such as viruses and bacteria can multiply through asexual reproduction — they basically copy themselves, which is more energy-efficient and can carry forward the exact competitive advantage that made a species successful in its existing environment. If that's possible, then why on earth would sexual reproduction be as prevalent as it is in most complex, living creatures?

Most biologists today would agree that the answer lies in how innovation occurs in nature. Sexual reproduction might not be an efficient way of multiplying the absolute number of species, but it is an extremely efficient mechanism for producing variation in species. This ability to generate diversity is key for the adaptation and survival of species over the long term — as most ecosystems tend to change frequently in the natural world over a sufficiently long period of time. Asexual reproduction is in fact terrible for a species' survival when its environment changes. As a result, nature allows for short-term inefficiency in favor of longer-term survival.

This has multiple implications for the budding entrepreneur as well as the seasoned executive. Innovation that propels your company forward is not likely to come easily or efficiently. If it is too easy or too efficient, chances are it is not innovative enough, since it can be copied by your competitors. Also, look around your company and notice how ideas bubble up. If year after year, the same handful of influential people's ideas are winning, then the organization is likely to become less innovative.

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3. Success is not necessarily strategic.

Termites are not the brainiest of creatures, and yet they are some of the most successful insect groups in the world. A termite mound, if left undisturbed by humans, can grow to be upwards of 40 feet high. In Brazil, scientists discovered an elaborate metropolis of termite mounds that grew to cover a landmass the size of Great Britain, making the mounds visible from space. Most termite mounds are also quite elaborate on the inside, with structural resilience that can put most architects' creations to shame. Termites pull this off without having managers, HR departments, or even a formal communications system. The workaholic bugs use simple signals such as pheromones to do a handful of repetitive tasks based on simple rules.

From a business perspective, such natural phenomena have profound lessons. Just because an organization is complex and resilient, that does not mean it is the result of an intentional leadership strategy. In fact, it is usually the opposite. Decentralized teams and independent employees can easily weave processes, products, and people together to create solutions customers need. Such unintentional complexity can be seen as serendipitous in good times and a pain to undo in bad ones.

Further, being quick and adaptive, at least in the early days of a startup, should be sufficient to keep it in the running against incumbents who are neither. It is not that these startups do not have a profoundly deep strategy (most VCs would argue that pitch decks are exactly that!) but that the strategy has yet to prove itself out in the marketplace. Agile methodologies embrace this uncertainty and can successfully produce items and services customers want by creating them bit by bit, with each iteration being adapted to a customer's most obvious needs. This also explains the now popular mantra of customer obsession, a term championed by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, in a whole new light. Over time, solving for customers' needs faithfully and rapidly can create an organization that is hard to copy and even harder to compete against.