3 Business Lessons From the World of BiologyCompanies and living creatures grow in eerily similar ways. These lessons from nature can help you thrive-and avoid disruption.

Business leaders are often fascinated bymilitarytactics, and with understandable reason: They see themselves as waging battle against challenging incumbents and evading minefields in the marketplace. But there is a radically different, equally important way of understanding business — and it often goes overlooked. It is the way business mimics biology.

Bruce Henderson, the late founder ofBoston Consulting Group(BCG), wrote about this concept in 1989. He insisted that a plan of attack createdpurelythrough logic and imagination was insufficient to win in the real world. A successful strategy had to recognize the complex web of natural competition and laws of nature that govern competitive advantages ofallspecies — including people, who compete primarily with each other through commerce.