Christopher Meyer

Author and Advisor on the Future of Business

BIG IDEAS

• Network-based Business Innovation
  If most of the great ideas for innovation reside outside the four walls of your organization, how can your company best access and exploit them? Chris makes a strong case for network-based business innovation. The key is in using networks of individuals—both within and outside of your institution—to garner different perspectives on a problem, recombine these perspectives to generate new approaches, and then apply selective pressure to squeeze out the most inventive and useful ideas. Chris introduces his audience to “WorkNets,” a method of linking these diverse sources of innovation and ensuring they have traction in the enterprise.
• The Adaptive Enterprise
  Ninety-nine percent of all species ever to have lived on earth are now extinct, and 99 percent of all companies that ever existed are now gone. Chris lays out how, in a world of increasing economic and structural volatility, organizations must become truly adaptive to survive, much less thrive. Taking lessons from the biological world, adaptive enterprises have the capacity to sense, respond to, and adapt to changes in their environment. The conundrum is that most organizations were designed to preserve and reinforce stability, which puts them at risk for financial or strategic obsolescence. Chris shows how a new group of companies are putting this adaptive capability into their genes, by examining Capital One, the U.S. Marine Corps, BP, and Maxygen. He proposes six practical business principles that can be implemented today.

SNAPSHOT BIO

Christopher Meyer is a founder of Monitor Talent. Chris's mission is to anticipate and shape the future of business. He has pursued this goal as entrepreneur, author, leader of a think tank, consultant, and executive. He writes and speaks about the trends shaping business and economic developments. His most recent book is It's Alive: The Coming Convergence of Information, Biology, and Business. He has also co-authored Blur: The Speed of Change in the Connected Economy and Future Wealth with Stan Davis, and contributed to publications such as Harvard Business Review, Sloan Management Review, Fast Company, TIME, The Wall Street Journal, BusinessWeek, and Business 2.0.

Chris’ recent research and consulting have focused on the development of the Adaptive Enterprise, helping companies create the capacity to sense, respond, and adapt to changes in their business environments.

From 2004 to 2009 he was the Chief Executive of Monitor Networks, a Monitor Group company. Prior to joining Monitor Group, Chris was the Director of the Center for Business Innovation at Cap Gemini Ernst & Young, from 1995 until its closing in December 2002. The Center fostered the conversation of leading issues among the business community, developed public conferences, established new services and businesses, and shared what it learned with business practitioners. At the CBI, he founded and served on the Board of the Bios Group, a venture that invested in applications of complexity theory to business.

Before joining Cap Gemini Ernst & Young, he was a Vice President and Group Head at Mercer Management Consulting, where from 1984 to 1995 he founded and built the firm’s practice in the information industries, comprising telecommunications, hardware, software, and information services and media.

Chris holds a B.A. in both Mathematics and Economics from Brandeis University and a M.B.A. (with Distinction) from The Harvard Business School. In addition, he held a University Predoctoral Fellowship in Economics at the University of Pennsylvania.

He serves on the Board of Icosystem, the Massachusetts Innovation & Technology Exchange, the Mass Nanotech Exchange, the Rhode Island Economic Development Corporation, and the advisory Boards of LaunchCyte and Corey McPherson Nash.

ENGAGEMENTS
How have other organizations utilized Chris's expertise, and what's ahead on his schedule?

Chris is best known for pioneering new services. Consider:

• At DRI (Data Resources Inc, pioneering econometrics-based consulting firm founded by Otto Eckstien of the Council of Economic Advisors), he helped build service architecture for financial institutions that endures 30 years later.
• At TBS/Mercer, he founded (in 1984) one of the first consulting groups counselling IT companies (e.g. Microsoft, Texas Instruments, AT&T, Digital Equipment, NYNEX) about industry development and marketing issues—the group was perhaps the first to predict cellular telephone costs would fall below wireline.
• At E&Y/CGEY, he directed the Center for Business Innovation and transformed it from an insular university model to a networked research capability, correctly anticipating issues from the "global, mobile, always-on" network to the rising importance of intangible assets.
• Currently, at Monitor, he developed the strategy for and is building the Monitor Networks business, combining his understanding of network science, network technology, and network behavior to help clients and Monitor profit from network-based business innovation.

RECOMMENDED READING
What's on Chris's must-read list?

Chris’s must-read list includes The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion and Biomimicry by Janine Benyus.

Currently on his bedside table:

Fooled by Randomness, Nassim Taleb

The Conversations, Walter Murch

Radiant Cool, Dan Lloyd

Signs of Life: How Complexity Pervades Biology, Ricard Sole and Brian Goodwin

Multiple issues of The New Yorker and Wired

MIND FUEL
Which blogs, web sites, and industry events does Chris tap into to feed his mind and fuel his creativity?

PC Forum (www.release1-0.com/pcforum/)

EG (new Richard Saul Wurman conference,
http://www.eg2006.com/)

World Economic Forum (http://www.weforum.org/)

O'Reilly Open Source Convention (http://conferences.oreillynet.com/os2007/)

Institute for Systems Biology (http://www.systemsbiology.org/)

LiveJournal (LiveJournal.com)

Blogs:

Tech Review (http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/)

This Web Day (http://www.thiswebday.com/)

Mindbullets (http://www.mindbullets.net/Subscription/MindBulletsIntro.aspx)

OUTREACH
What are Chris's pressing questions, and on which topics does he seek your feedback?

• What is at the leading edge of network science? Network technology? Network behavior? How will developments in these three areas lead to network-based business innovation?
• How can self-organization and leadership be most effectively combined?
• What will replace democratic capitalism as the dominant model of national development?