The analogy breaks down pretty quickly. There’s lots of tissue in the human body that’s generically distinct from gut flora, that won’t die instant without it. Corporations without people would be just a bunch of writing on paper and a bunch of empty office space and some buildings full of tools that don’t work. Corporations are made of people like human bodies are made of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen.
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Alternatively, you can’t beat a good big war for inspiring and funding innovation…
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I can’t find the link to the article…or was this just a one line statement?
I like the idea, but would posit that no corporation in existence has approached anything close to immortality, maybe that was suppose to read immoral, if so carry on…
Corporations are made of people like human bodies are made of cells. I would however argue that this much more importantly holds true for states, which have a more significant life of their own and goals not necessarily aligned with those of their constituents.
@doctorow Arie de Geus wrote an excellent book titled ‘The Living Company’. In it, he points out that most companies die young, and even very large ones have a life expectancy of forty or fifty years. Interestingly, there are some that last much longer; those tend to share a few characteristics: they are sensitive to their environment; they are financially conservative; they tolerate eccentricity and innovation; and they have a strong sense of community identity. Companies where people are just in it to make a buck tend to live shorter lives than most humans, and ironically have smaller profits over 25+ year periods than their longer-lived and more communal competitors.
Also, as @8080256256 and anansi (sorry can’t use your username due to new user policy) suggest, humans are still more essential to corporations than are technical artifacts or legal frameworks (although following Charlie Stross, we can imagine futures where the technical artifacts and legal frameworks do not require humans to animate their corporate identities any longer).
I think that before we see widespread life extension in corporations, we will need to have a clear shared understanding of integrity – in the sense of wholeness in a dynamic self-organizing system. Without the science and art of integrity as a widespread discipline, corporations will only be long-lived by accident or the personal inspiration of a visionary leader; once we widely understand how to develop and maintain organizational integrity, we will justifiably expect our corporations to last for centuries – and to genuinely serve their stakeholder communities as an inextricable part of doing so.
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You think states have more vitality and initiative than corporations? Perhaps you had the 1940s in mind?
Now here’s a thought experiment: It’s true corporations gave us all kinds of important technology, and I wouldn’t prefer to live in a world without anesthetic. But is there any other way of organizing people that could also have produced, manufactured, and distributed all the good things we enjoy? Suppose, for example, the corporation had never been invented, but everybody was a member of a labor union or a kibbutz. Would we be running around in saber-tooth tiger skins?
I think your perspective is highly Americo-centric. Corporations matter, but they are not nearly the dominant force in global terms.
Um, no. I try to encourage healthy gut flora.
If corporations
are not nearly the dominant force in global terms
what would you argue, is
the dominant force in global terms
?
Large nation states and the EU. I just wanted to point out that the “gut flora” logic applies identically to any such super-entity.
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Cells typically can’t exist for long outside the body, so if humans were cells in a corporation, that would make the corporation essential to our existance. While the corporate agenda very much asserts that idea, I don’t think there’s much evidence to support it. Gut bacteria at least have an identity outside their host.
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Flora is actually the more often used word here. Gut flora, skin flora… One of the definitions of the word “flora”, citing wiktionary, is “The microorganisms that inhabit some part of the body, such as intestinal flora”.
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Sounds interesting. Did the book talk about cooperatives, like Mondragon?
It’s not that I have great love for Cory, it’s that I have little tolerance for weak criticisms!! 
And that’s the metamucil logo. Meta is the fiber on which gut flora thrive.
I’m pretty sure i’m an animal, not a plant:
https://www.google.co.uk/#safe=off&q=define:flora
the plants of a particular region, habitat, or geological period.
vs
https://www.google.co.uk/#safe=off&q=define:fauna
the animals of a particular region, habitat, or geological period.
but hey, bacteria are a kingdom all thier own, and therefore neither flora nor fauna (nor virii, nor fungi). However I don’t really accept the common usage argument that ultimately justifies a dimunition of language, more words for things allow for more subtlety and complexity of expression, more exacting definitions, hence i’m all in favour of technologies that expand our lexicon, wether they be txtspk or eggcorns, and vehemently opposed to restrictions (ie ‘queens’ english, or 'y’know, like, that thing where, like, things are repeated to, y’know, make up for a lack of, like, things). i’m not a grammer nazi, im a vocabulary crusader.
also apologies to all the sentient, motile plants posting in this thread, and well done to you for bucking the vegetative stereotype…
How would you classify all the couch potatoes then?
That’s true, that’s who I am. However, if you think the EU is a truly independent body untainted by the corruption of corporate lucre, I think you are very naive. I would think that if you were American or Peruvian or Martian.
No, it did not. It’s an obvious area to explore, but de Geus skipped it. I think his focus has been mostly on longevity in large for-profit companies (and I realize that co-operatives are properly speaking for-profit, but they seem to have been outside his scope). But many of the companies he describes are hundreds of years old – older than the major nineteenth century wave of co-operative business development, and far older than Mondragon. I think many co-ops, particularly multi-stakeholder co-ops, fit the characteristics shared by long-lived companies, which suggests that co-operative ownership structures may be part of the long-term solutions to business sustainability issues.
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Even more weirdly, many of these bacteria are almost certainly not flora OR fauna in the traditionally accepted definitions.
If Flora = Plants (which is to say Eukaryotic polycellular organisms with cell walls and photosynthetic organelles), and Fauna = Animals (which is to say Eukaryotic polycellular organisms without cell walls, and including the animals that people inventing early latin would have been able to see).
Then bacteria are part of a totally different segment of the phylogenic tree:
Maybe it seems pedantic, but I feel like only the largest corporations and states (or maybe future ones who own large fleets of self powered robots) will be distant enough from humans to be analogous to how different we are from gram-positive bacteria like Bacillus or Clostridium species.
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