Geoffrey West on Why Cities Survive and Companies Die

My take: Organisations and Living Beings are the unit of selection whereas cities, economies and ecosystems are emergent entities comprising of these units. In a complex adaptive system that needs to innovate just to maintain the status quo, the unit of selection is usually fragile as it competes with all other units. In fact, if the micro-unit is more resilient, then it leads to fragility at the macro-level. In other words, micro-resilience is incompatible with macro-resilience in many complex adaptive systems as I explain here.