It's Alive!: The Coming Convergence of Information, Biology and Business

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 outre 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.