Thursday, December 31, 2015

A Model for Corporate Power Distribution

In 1997 Geoffrey B. West, James H. Brown and Brian J. Enquist published "A General Model for the Origin of Allometric Scaling Laws in Biology".  I don't have access to the paper, but it is summarized in a youtube video here:


How Fractal Patterns Perpetuate Through a Tree, and then a Forest - Bonzai Permaculture -

In 2009 they also published A general quantitative theory of forest structure and dynamics.

The gist of the studies is that an individual tree's branch distribution (size, distance between branches, and most importantly oxygen production) provides an accurate prediction of the whole forests tree distribution.


I tend to believe these studies provide a basis for company skill level distribution.  Call it "brain power" if you want.  In a power-optimized company, there will be a fractal distribution of people with various capacities and skills.  They won't all be power-players because there is mundane work that also needs to be done - there's a wide distribution of needs addressed by a wide distribution of workers.

The alternative is a farm-model, where the whole undergrowth of a wild forest is stripped away.  This then becomes a question of whether the farm is more efficient than the forest.

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