14 Principles of Management

Biological Parallel

Fayol's 14 principles—division of work, authority, discipline, unity of command, etc.—read like a description of ant colony organization that evolved over 100 million years. Ants have division of labor (specialized castes), scalar chain (pheromone gradients from queen to workers), esprit de corps (colony-level cooperation), and stability of tenure (queens live decades). These aren't management innovations; they're convergent evolution. When human organizations need to coordinate thousands of individuals, we rediscover the same principles that enabled eusocial insects to dominate ecosystems. Fayol documented biology's management playbook.