Kleiber's Law
Organizations have metabolic limits on how fast they can acquire and process resources - talent, capital, information.
A 5,000-person company cannot make decisions as fast as a 50-person startup. That's not bureaucracy - that's surface area to volume ratios.
In 1932, Swiss agricultural scientist Max Kleiber at UC Davis discovered that metabolism doesn't scale with mass (M^1.0) but with mass to the 3/4 power (M^0.75). A 1 kg animal uses ~10 watts; a 10 kg animal uses ~56 watts (5.6×, not 10×); a 1,000 kg animal uses ~1,778 watts (177.8×, not 1,000×).
Larger animals are more efficient per pound - an elephant uses less energy per kilogram than a mouse. But they still need more total energy, and there's a ceiling on how fast they can acquire it. A mouse can eat 50% of its body weight daily; an elephant can only process 2-3%. Blue whales consume 4 tons of krill per day during feeding season - 2% of body weight, near maximum digestive throughput. A 300-ton whale would need 6 tons daily, requiring 24-hour feeding with no rest - physically impossible.
Business Application of Kleiber's Law
Organizations have metabolic limits on how fast they can acquire and process resources - talent, capital, information. Amazon could metabolize 3,000 engineers per quarter; Walmart could only absorb 300. The limit isn't always money; it's often capability acquisition rate.
Discovery
Max Kleiber (1932)
Discovered that metabolic rate scales with body mass to the 3/4 power, not linearly, establishing one of biology's most robust scaling laws
Kleiber's Law Appears in 4 Chapters
Kleiber's Law creates hard metabolic limits - even efficient large organisms hit ceilings on resource acquisition rate that constrain maximum viable size.
Metabolic limits on growth →The 3/4 scaling exponent means size determines metabolism, and metabolism determines almost everything about how an organism - or organization - operates.
Kleiber's Law explained →Kleiber's Law demonstrates how power law relationships emerge from geometric constraints, producing regularities that span twelve orders of magnitude.
Power law scaling in metabolism →The 3/4 exponent emerges from fractal branching networks that distribute resources through space-filling geometries - physics, not biology, determines the ratio.
The physics of metabolic scaling →