Why Your Company Obeys the Same Laws as a Dying Star

Your organization is a heat engine. It converts energy into work. And just like every other system in the universe, it’s governed by laws it cannot break.

Most executives don’t realize they’re fighting physics. They think that if they hire smarter people, run better meetings, or implement the right framework, they can overcome the fundamental forces pulling their company toward chaos. They can’t. The same laws that govern stars, refrigerators, and the eventual heat death of the universe also govern why your Q3 initiative is dying in committee.

Welcome to the thermodynamics of organizations.

The Temperature You Cannot Measure

In 1931, a physicist named Ralph Fowler had a problem. Three laws of thermodynamics had already been established and numbered. But scientists realized they’d missed something fundamental — so basic that it had to come before the others. Rather than renumber everything, they called it the Zeroth Law and stuck it at the beginning.

The Zeroth Law states that if System A is in equilibrium with System C, and System B is in equilibrium with System C, then System A is in equilibrium with System B. Sounds obvious. Sounds trivial. But without it, you can’t define temperature. You can’t build a thermometer. You can’t measure anything.

Organizations have the same problem.

Walk into any large company and ask what they stand for. You’ll get polished answers. Customer obsession. Innovation. Excellence. Now ask three different teams what that means in practice. Watch them give you three completely different answers.

Marketing thinks customer obsession means never saying no to feature requests. Engineering thinks it means building robust systems that don’t break. Finance thinks it means not wasting money on features customers haven’t proven they’ll pay for. They’re all in “equilibrium” with the company’s stated values, but they’re not in equilibrium with each other.

This is why culture initiatives fail. You can plaster values on walls, but without the Zeroth Law — without actual alignment that propagates transitively across the organization — you’re just measuring temperature with broken thermometers. Each team operates at a different “temperature,” moving at different speeds, optimizing for different things. They think they’re aligned because they all report to the same CEO. They’re not.

The Zeroth Law isn’t about writing better value statements. It’s about accepting that alignment is a measurable property, and most companies haven’t actually achieved it.

Consider how Stripe approaches pricing decisions. If you ask their product team why they made a feature free versus paid, they’ll talk about reducing friction for developers. Ask their sales team why certain enterprise features are behind higher tiers, and they’ll give you the same answer — reducing friction for developers means making the simple path free and charging for complexity at scale. Ask their support team why they prioritize certain bug fixes, and again: reduce friction for developers.

Three different functions, one temperature. They’re not reciting a value statement. They’re in actual equilibrium with a principle that propagates through decisions. Product doesn’t build features Sales can’t explain. Sales doesn’t promise features Product won’t build. Support doesn’t escalate requests that violate the core principle. They’re like three thermometers in the same room, all reading the same temperature because they’re actually measuring the same thing.

This is what the Zeroth Law looks like in practice. Not agreement on words, but alignment on what those words mean when you have to choose between two real options with real trade-offs.

The Energy You Cannot Create

The First Law of Thermodynamics killed the dream of perpetual motion machines. Energy cannot be created or destroyed, only converted from one form to another. Every scam artist who promised free energy ran headlong into this wall. The universe doesn’t negotiate.

Neither does human attention.

You have exactly 2,080 working hours per employee per year. That’s your energy budget. It’s fixed. Immutable. When your CEO announces a new strategic priority without killing an old one, she’s claiming to have invented a perpetual motion machine. When your manager asks you to “find time” for one more project, he’s asking you to violate the First Law.

It doesn’t work.

But here’s where organizations get cleverer than physics scammers. They’ve learned to hide the violation. They don’t ask people to create new time. They ask them to “shift priorities,” “work smarter,” or “find efficiencies.” This sounds reasonable. It sounds like they understand the First Law.

They don’t.

Because attention doesn’t just convert cleanly from one form to another. When you switch someone from Project A to Project B, you don’t get a perfect transfer of energy. You get massive losses to context switching, to rebuilding mental models, to meetings about the transition. A physicist would call this waste heat. A manager calls it “just how things are.”

The thermodynamic truth is brutal: one person working full-time on one thing produces more than ten people each spending ten percent of their time. The math seems wrong, but the physics is clear. Every context switch is an energy conversion with terrible efficiency. Every meeting is a heat loss. Every “quick question” is entropy.

This is why Amazon’s two-pizza teams work. They’re not some cute management gimmick. They’re a recognition that human energy, like all energy in the universe, is conserved and lossy. Keep the system small and focused, and you minimize the conversions. You keep more of the useful work.

The Disorder You Cannot Stop

The Second Law of Thermodynamics is the most depressing truth in physics. Entropy always increases. Disorder always wins. Everything in the universe is sliding toward chaos, and there’s nothing you can do to stop it. You can slow it down. You can create local pockets of order. But the total disorder of any closed system only goes in one direction.

Your organization is that closed system.

When you started the company, there were three of you in a garage. Communication was instant. Everyone knew everything. Decisions happened in real time. You had almost no entropy.

Then you hired person number four. Now you have six relationships to manage instead of three. You hired person number ten, and the communication pathways exploded to forty-five. By the time you hit a hundred people, you had 4,950 potential communication links. The math is n(n-1)/2, and it’s merciless.

But the problem isn’t just the number of connections. It’s that entropy is insidious. It doesn’t announce itself. It creeps in through tiny cracks.

Someone adds “just one slide” to a deck. Someone creates “just one more approval step” to prevent a mistake. Someone schedules “just a quick sync” to make sure everyone’s aligned. Each addition seems rational in isolation. Each one increases entropy.

Six months later, you need three meetings to schedule a meeting. You need a steering committee to approve a decision that one person could have made. You need forty-five minutes of a presentation just to get to the actual question. The useful energy of your organization — the part that actually builds things customers want — has degraded into the heat energy of process and bureaucracy.

This is learned helplessness at the molecular level. It’s not that people become passive because they’re weak. They become passive because they’re watching entropy win. They’re watching the disorder increase despite their best efforts, and eventually they stop fighting.

The Second Law tells you something most management books won’t: you cannot prevent organizational entropy. You can only fight it, constantly, with energy from outside the system. Single-threaded leadership is that external energy. It’s a deliberate injection of order into the chaos. You take one leader, give them clear boundaries, remove the noise, and watch them create a pocket of low entropy in a high-entropy world.

But here’s the catch — that pocket of order only exists because you’re increasing entropy somewhere else. The rest of the organization has to accept that this team gets to operate differently, move faster, ignore the standard processes. That decision, that unfairness, that’s the disorder you’re pushing into the surrounding system to keep your critical initiative ordered.

Physics doesn’t give you free order. It just lets you choose where to put the chaos.

The Perfection You Cannot Reach

The Third Law of Thermodynamics states that you cannot reach absolute zero. You can get close. You can cool a system down to millionths of a degree above zero. But you can’t touch zero itself. It’s a limit you can approach but never cross.

Organizations have the same asymptote with efficiency.

Every consultant promises it. Every new framework claims it. Zero waste. Perfect alignment. Frictionless execution. Absolute zero bureaucracy. And every single one is selling you something that violates the Third Law.

The fantasy goes like this: if you just implement the right structure, hire the right people, use the right tools, you can eliminate all the inefficiency. Every meeting will be productive. Every email will be necessary. Every process will add value. You’ll reach organizational absolute zero, where all energy goes into useful work.

You won’t.

Because even Amazon, with all its single-threaded leadership and two-pizza teams, still has meetings. Still has coordination costs. Still has inefficiency. They didn’t eliminate entropy. They just got it low enough that it stopped killing them.

This distinction matters more than it seems. Most companies never start transforming because they’re waiting for the perfect system. They see the inefficiencies in their current structure, and they see inefficiencies in the proposed new structure, so they stay put. They’re waiting for absolute zero.

They’re waiting for something physics says cannot exist.

The Third Law gives you permission to be imperfect. It tells you that some waste is unavoidable, some friction is inherent, some entropy is just the cost of doing business. The question isn’t whether your single-threaded team will have zero overhead. The question is whether you can get the overhead low enough that the team can actually move.

Can you get close enough to zero that the difference doesn’t matter?

Amazon did. They didn’t create perfect efficiency. They created teams with low enough entropy to ship AWS, to build Prime, to launch Alexa while everyone else was still debating in committee. They got close enough to absolute zero that they lapped companies still trying to reach perfection.

The Physics of Winning

Here’s what the four laws tell you about organizations: alignment is measurable, and most companies haven’t achieved it. Attention is finite and cannot be created. Disorder always increases unless you fight it. And perfection is impossible, so stop waiting for it.

Every company that fails does so by violating these laws. They assume they can add priorities without subtracting them. They let entropy accumulate until nothing moves. They wait for perfect conditions that thermodynamics says will never arrive. They talk about culture without creating actual equilibrium.

Every company that wins does so by respecting the physics. Amazon didn’t invent new laws of organizations. They accepted that human attention is conserved, that entropy increases, and that perfection is a limit.

Then they built a system that works within those constraints instead of fighting them.

The laws of thermodynamics have been running the universe for 13.8 billion years. They’re not going to make an exception for your Q3 roadmap.

The only question is whether you’ll fight them or use them.