Book Review

Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies by Geoffrey B. West
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

From satisfying to terrifying to hilarious to challenging and everywhere in between, this book will take you on a wildly entertaining and interesting ride, especially if you are like me and deal with issues related to scale directly every single day.

The author, Geoffrey B. West, is a physicist by training, and worked at Los Alamos National Laboratory (shout out to the town of my birth!). However, he does not focus on physics in this book, instead opening up his inquiry into seeing if the universe provides a “more integrated scientific framework that encompasses a quantitative, predictive, mechanistic theory for understanding the relationship between human-engineered systems, both social and physical, and the ‘natural’ environment— a framework I call a grand unified theory of sustainability.”

In other words, looking at patterns in the natural world, specifically how organism live, scale, reproduce, and die, can we find patterns and lessons that can help us understand and solve issues related to scaling in man-made organizations/systems such as cities and businesses?

Spoiler alert, we can! Oh, and yeah, like with most good science, it also “depends.” But perhaps the most intriguing part of this book is the fact that the more organisms and systems West and his colleagues at the Santa Fe Institute examined, the more seemingly universal patterns revealed themselves. It is worth the time and effort to read this book just to see all the various data sets and graphs he explains showing how a mouse is like an elephant is like New York City.

At the same time, it is entirely possible to read this book at a more cursory level, skimming sections to pull out some of the main lessons without diving deep into specific cases West details. You do not need an advanced science degree, or any degree at all, to read the book, but people with a geek tendency and an appreciation of data and data visualizations will likely find a bit more delight in the work.

West also adds some fun anecdotes about the people behind the various studies and discoveries, if anything I think he went off on these tangents a bit too frequently and the book could have been edited down a bit. Similarly, I think he could have shaved down a bit of the section on cities (it was clear this was the non-biology-based area where his work was having the most success) and expand more into business and software/technology. I will admit this criticism likely comes from my own personal bias and desire to better understand challenges related to scaling distributed systems, microservices, and cloud-computing.

I cannot wait to see who takes the baton from West to move this work to its next phase.



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