How a company is like a person

The law states that a company is a legal person, and is treated like one. The only difference between a biological being and a company is that a company can live for ever.

This is only the obvious similarity behind a company and a person.

The other similarities seem vast. Companies invest significant time and money maintaining their brand value(s). So do humans. We contemplate before our conversations, do a lot of impression management, shop for clothes. There! both time and money.

Companies spend considerable resources optimising their supply chain. How can they minimise supply chain costs and deliver the most value for the least cost, in order to make a profit. For humans, their skill set and experience is their supply chain. By going to universities, by working no different projects, they "invest" in their supply chains to deliver better products.

We spend a large amount of time organising our mental and physical resources to do a good job. This is the parallel of HR which spends a lot of resources to organise the right people for the job.

We spend a lot of time planning our budget, trying to save tax, and record keeping. This is what companies do as finance.

Sometimes we ask consultants to manage our budget and tax. This is the parallel of outsourcing for firms.

Every function (finance, supply chain, marketing, HR) all have parallels in a single individual. This is truly fascinating. The both are bound together by the interest to survive.

Let us not forget, that the practices of the best companies survive. These are like their genes. Our organisations are evolving to find better and more efficient methods, such that their "selfish" practices servive. I am alluding to Charles Dawkin's book "the selfish gene". He himself writes about how evolution is the driving force of everything in the universe, not just living things.

Is it not fasicnating, when a 1000 people are working in a department of a company, they are essentially doing the same job as when a person thinks with millions of neurons. That is why the organisation is called a living, breathing animal.