Natural selection may contain a key to helping companies develop faster, as well as more efficiently and singlemindedly. So concludes James Hines, a senior lecturer in MIT's Sloan School of Management, after spending two years testing analogies between the behavior of organizations and the evolution of biological species.

The parallels between organizations and organisms are striking, Hines maintains. As a prerequisite for evolution, for example, an entity has to be able to pass on a basic unit of information that initiates a stream of actions. In organisms this unit is the gene. "But corporations also have something that produces a stream of actions," Hines says, "and that's a policy." By policy he means any rule about how decisions are made-such as "We will raise prices when inventories are low, and lower prices when inventories are high." Every organization has a large genome of such policies-hundreds or thousands of them, both formal and informal-that govern their success in the marketplace.