Now if you take a look at the twenty-three or so canonical operations from Renaissance-era alchemy – transmuting being only one – you’ll find incorporatus (Latin for "embodiment", and the root for "incorporation") as a practice for aggregating component parts into a corpus (Latin for "body"). What a no-brainer there. I could go into detail, but one can read about that elsewhere. We were talking about biology, not demonology…

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I first stumbled on the phrase corporate metabolism in reference to Swiss management consultants trying to describe how corporations adapt to new flows of information. Their obvious analogy equates information flows inside a corporate structure with energy flows inside living cells – muddied, problematic thinking, given a more realistic view of "information," but a potentially useful analogy. If one considers how corporate form can be compared with a biological system, what do both share in common?

Consider how the most basic tenet of corporate strategy, creating a "barrier to entry" to block competition, parallels what a cell wall provides for the most primitive critters, the single-cell protozoa.

Three necessary conditions for corporate organization – (1) chartered company, (2) limited liability, and (3) joint stock – provide means for externalizing risk while perpetuating wealth for shareholders. That’s a mouthful, but it renders the corporate form valuable. Risk is the big, hairy problem in business; it generates cost. Risk in the biological realm has much to do with entropy, i.e., death and extinction. Strangely enough, one contemporary approach in physics, the study of dissipative structures, addresses how complex, open systems can dissipate or externalize entropy in some cases. In other words, it addresses how evolution in physical systems can be modeled. Biologists find this rather useful. So do corporate bodies; the study of autopoiesis in law focuses on such complex, open systems. Math and computer simulations used for researching evolutionary biology may become quite useful for modeling how the corporate form develops and responds to particular conditions.

Early protozoa eventually aggregated together into primitive multi-cell parazoa, such as sponges… which biologists call "colonial organisms." The process of incorporating under a charter similarly aggregates business resources into an initial structure that resembles a sponge. In an odd twist of semantics, the first three or four hundred years of corporate endeavor focused precisely on colonial activities, much like Nike and others still do today.

Management consultants use taxonomy to categorize the complexity of corporate structures. So an H-form describes a "holding company," like the early days of East India Company, and akin to a sponge. A more complex U-form describes a "top-down" structure, like Standard Oil before antitrust, and also akin to an invertebrate. An even more complex M-form describes the modern "transnational," such as Ford or Exxon – akin to a spoiled brat.

The applicable analogies go on: metastasis, i.e. cancer, parallels the dynamics of franchising… corporate self-defense reflexes occur through a process of sublation… allometric scaling, or multi-dimensional encoding, parallels how global firms operate in multi-dimensional spaces simultaneously… bacteriophage as a means for asexual genetic transfer parallels how corporations exchange their "genetic" material: contracts, bylaws, patents, etc.

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