It's Alive: The Coming Convergence of Information, Biology and Business [Import] [Hardcover]

Chris Meyer (Author), Stan Davis (Author)

Product Details

• Hardcover: 256 pages
• Publisher: Texere Publishing,US (November 3, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1587991756
• ISBN-13: 978-1587991752
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.3 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #8,208,513 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Christopher Meyer is dedicated to anticipating and shaping the future of business. He has pursued this goal as entrepreneur, executive, consultant, leader of a think tank, and author. Two consistent threads run through Meyer's writing: adaptive enterprise and network-based business innovation. Adaptive enterprise refers to the application of lessons of biology to the design of enterprises with the capacity to sense, respond to, and adapt to changes in their environment. Network-based business innovation makes the case for leveraging networks of individuals - both within and outside an organization - to garner different perspectives on a problem, recombine them to generate new approaches, and then apply selective pressure to 'squeeze out' the most inventive and useful ideas. These two threads coalesce into the overarching theme of Meyer's thought leadership, namely the application of network science to business and innovation.

Meyer has published three books, including BusinessWeek Best Seller "Blur: The Speed of Change in the Connected Economy," "Future Wealth," and "It's Alive: The Coming Convergence of Information, Biology, and Business." He blogs on the Harvard Business Review site, and has contributed to publications including Harvard Business Review, Sloan Management Review, Fast Company, TIME, The Wall Street Journal, and BusinessWeek. Meyer is currently in the process of writing his fourth book, "Standing on the Sun," about how capitalism evolves as the economic center of gravity shifts to low-income, fast-growth, digital-native economies, which will be published by Harvard Business School Press in November of 2011.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

22 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Look at the Future from the Laboratories of Today, June 30, 2003

By 

Donald Mitchell "Jesus Loves You!" (Thanks for Providing My Reviews over 109,000 Helpful Votes Globally) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: It's Alive: The Coming Convergence of Information, Biology, and Business (Hardcover)

It's Alive has an unusual perspective. The authors argue that the valuable innovations of the next ten years are being developed in the research laboratories and advanced developments of organizations and companies today. The template is looking backward at Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center in 1971 as a way to have gotten a preview of today's computer-connected society.

The book will primarily appeal to those with an interest in applying complexity science and biological analogies through information technology to large organizations. Most of the applications here require tens of millions of dollars to do. So for those in small organizations, the examples will seem out-of-reach.

The main advantage of this book over similar books is that it has more and more contemporary examples and a further development of its concepts than the predecessors that I have read.

From looking at technological developments that are available now and those that are in process, Christopher Meyer and Stan Davis see the maturing of the information technology revolution occurring at the same time as the commercialization of various "molecular" technologies (such as nanotechnology, biotechnology and materials science). Because the two fields operate conceptually in similar ways, the authors point to a convergence that has begun between the two fields that will probably grow in the future. They also draw key lessons from the way that evolutionary biology operates to prescribe for business organizations in the future.

Here's the book's structure:

Introduction

Part I The Next Ten Years
Chapter 1 Economic Evolution: Learning from Life Cycles

Part II Code Is Code
Chapter 2 General Evolution: Learning from Nature
Chapter 3 Biology and the World of the Molecule
Chapter 4 Information and the World of Bits

Part III The Adaptive Enterprise
Chapter 5 Adaptive Management
Chapter 6 Seed, Select, and Amplify at Capital One
Chapter 7 Breeding Early and Often at the U.S. Marine Corps
Chapter 8 Creating the Capacity to Respond at BP
Chapter 9 Born Adaptive at Maxygen
Chapter 10 Becoming an Adaptive Enterprise

Part IV Convergence
Chapter 11 The Adjacent Possible

To me, the most interesting parts of the book involved advanced experiments and applications of technology to solve problems. Most of these I had not read about before. For the most part, these are written in ways that a lay person can easily follow.

The organizational examples were helpful to applying the concepts of an adaptive enterprise. Apply the six memes (gene-like qualities of ideas) for managing:

Self-organize; recombine; sense and respond; learn and adapt; seed, select, and amplify; destabilize.

Of the organizational examples, I found the Capital One and Maxygen examples the easiest to understand. The BP and U.S. Marine Corps examples seemed a little sketchy.

My favorite example in the entire book was of artist Eduardo Kac turning Genesis 1:28 into Morse code and translating the results into a DNA sequence. He then had the sequence inserted into live bacteria, and displayed the bacteria publicly where viewers could zap the bacteria with UV to create potential mutations. Now, that's technological convergence!

The book ends with some speculation about new applications of convergent technologies such as matter compilers, personal hospitals, universal individual lifelong mentors, experience machines and social-science stimulators.

Don't let the book's conceptual structure scare you off. Underneath the new definitions and concepts, there's a lot of common sense that most will agree with: Get experience fast; learn from your experience; keep it simple; be agile; get to the most valuable places first with the most; and communicate in all directions.

After you've finished reading the book, I suggest you think about how the book's principles could be accomplished on a shoe-string by an organization that you know well. In that way, you will play a valuable role in being a commercializer of advanced laboratory results.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Packed with Knowledge!, February 29, 2004

By 

Rolf Dobelli "getAbstract" (Switzerland) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: It's Alive: The Coming Convergence of Information, Biology, and Business (Hardcover)

Running a business these days feels like going on a blind date with the future. Most efforts to understand what lies ahead take on a rather breathless quality, lapsing into technobabble as they struggle to avoid the future's central truth: unknowability is its essence. Marshall McLuhan once observed that anticipating the future is like steering an automobile by looking into your rearview mirror. Yes, seeing where you've been does give you some idea of where you're going...but not much. That said, We strongly recommends this look into the crystal ball of technology. It's a clear improvement over most works of the future-shock genre. Soundly rooted in practical business applications, and presenting surprising examples and possibilities without resorting to mind-numbing jargon, this book will prove very useful to anyone savvy enough to realize that just improving your business is no longer enough.

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars It's Alive and Well, June 17, 2003

By A Customer

This review is from: It's Alive: The Coming Convergence of Information, Biology, and Business (Hardcover)

This is an original work that provides rich detail about why and how companies must adapt. As a college professor, working on an article about contingency marketing, I found "It's Alive" to have numerous insights and examples that will greatly help my work, if not my teaching. While many of the concepts are abstract, the authors almost always manage to make their points effectively and realistically. I enjoyed reading this book.