Aren't some things just business constructs with no biological basis?
The Short Answer
At surface level, yes—terms like 'Drag-Along Rights' and 'Technical Debt' are human inventions. But these constructs exist because they solve real problems, and those problems have biological parallels. The trick is to look past the CONSTRUCT to the OUTCOME it's trying to achieve. Biology has been solving the same problems for billions of years.
Biological Insight
Consider 'Drag-Along Rights'—a VC legal term with no obvious biological parallel. But what outcome does it achieve? It ensures collective action when a threshold is reached, preventing holdouts from blocking beneficial group decisions. Biology solved this with quorum sensing: when bacterial autoinducer concentration hits threshold, ALL cells commit—no individual can opt out. The surface construct is human; the underlying problem is ancient.
Key Questions to Ask Yourself
- What OUTCOME is this business construct trying to achieve?
- What problem does it solve that would exist even without business?
- How do biological systems handle this same coordination/allocation/signaling challenge?
- Is this a genuinely novel human invention, or a new label for an old problem?
- What can the biological solution teach us about edge cases and failure modes?
Common Mistakes
- Dismissing business-biology parallels as forced metaphors (look at outcomes, not surfaces)
- Assuming human inventions are exempt from natural laws
- Missing the deeper pattern by focusing on surface terminology
- Not recognizing that cognitive biases ARE biological—they're evolved heuristics, not business concepts