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

~ (Author), Stan Davis (Author) "IMAGINE that it's 1971 in Palo Alto, California..." (more)
Key Phrases: molecular economy, adaptive imperative, matter compiler, Capital One, Adaptive Enterprise, Marine Corps (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

The hackneyed trope of businesses as organisms in an economic ecosystem is updated in this informative but puffed-up volume of management theory. According to Meyer and Davis, authors of the New Economy manifesto Blur: The Speed of Change in the Connected Economy, the next big thing will be a "molecular economy"-biotechnology, nanotechnology and materials science-based on biological processes or things that mimic them. They spend several chapters on a tour of up-and-coming technologies, but their interest in them is mainly as avatars of a new managerial zeitgeist. In a coming age of unprecedented "volatility," businesses must abandon efforts to craft the perfect plan for the future and engineer the environment, and should instead embrace an evolutionary paradigm of "adaptive management" based on biological principles. Successful organizations must "self-organize" instead of relying on command-and-control, "recombine" best practices from diverse sources, "sense and respond" to changing conditions, "seed, select and amplify" a multitude of innovations and constantly "destabilize" themselves. Drawing on case studies of organizations including the Capital One credit card company and the Marine Corps, the authors apply these insights to basic business functions like inventory, pricing, product development and Web services. Their fluent, breathless style, replete with outré theorizing, maintains a relentless tone of future-shock over developments that are mostly high-tech extensions of age-old business practices. While some of their farther-out prognostications-e.g., virtual-reality "experience machines"-may prove that nothing gets dated faster than futurism, there are enough pragmatic applications here for alert executives to chew on. 18 line drawings.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review

?Holy cow! Integrating biology, management, nanotech, and evolution?if you loved James Gleick?s Chaos, you?ll love It?s Alive.??SETH GODIN, author of Survival is Not Enough

?Clearly captures the profound impact that biologically inspired technology and technology-infused biology will have on every aspect of our economy and society.? ?RAY KURZWEIL, inventor and author of The Age of Spiritual Machines

?The book to read for anyone concerned about business innovation at a time when nothing seems to be going right.??Antonio Damasio, Van Allen Professor of Neurology, University of Iowa, and author of Looking for Spinoza

?Read this exciting and sweeping book to regrind your own conceptual lenses for understanding business in the twenty-first century?the age of discontinuity.??JOHN SEELY BROWN, former director of Xerox PARC

?The Web is marrying the biological revolution and driving change in one industry after another. Chris Meyer and Stan Davis not only describe the coming revolution but provide a plan for prospecting in it.??Juan Enriquez, director of the Life Sciences Project,
Harvard Business School, and author of As the Future Catches You

?A CEO-level guide to the forces reshaping our economy. Meyer and Davis have created an essential tool kit for future growth.??Mick Yates, former group chairman, Johnson & Johnson Consumer -- Review

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 288 pages
• Publisher: Crown Business; 1 edition (May 13, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1400046416
• ISBN-13: 978-1400046416
• Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 6.4 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #651,347 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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	Professor Donald Mitchell "Jesus Makes Me a P... (Boston) - See all my reviews (TOP 10 REVIEWER)

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.com" (Switzerland) - See all my reviews (TOP 50 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

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 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.