James F. Moore
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James F. Moore is a well-known student of large scale social, economic, and technical systems. Moore pioneered the concepts of "business ecosystems" and the ecological approach as a way to communicate about systems evolution and business strategy. These concepts took root in high technology business, and are used for corporate strategy-making, business development, and investing in many business sectors.
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[edit] Business strategy
Moore published his approach in a Harvard Business Review article entitled "Predators and Prey: A New Ecology of Competition" in May/June of 1993, and won the McKinsey Award for best article of the year.
Moore's work resulted in a best-selling book, The Death of Competition: Leadership and Strategy in the Age of Business Ecosystems (HarperBusiness, 1996, ISBN 0-88730-850-3). The Wall Street Journal awarded the book its top rating of five stars and selected it as one of the top books for entrepreneurs published this decade. Moore's writing has been published in a variety of periodicals ranging from Foreign Affairs to The New York Times, Fortune and Fast Company. For many years Jim authored a regular column in Upside, the original Silicon Valley technology business magazine.
Business ecosystem strategy-making has become established in the academic world. The most comprehensive summary of the approach is by Harvard Business School faculty member Marco Iansiti and Roy Levien, in their book The Keystone Advantage: What the New Dynamics of Business Ecosystems Mean for Strategy, Innovation, and Sustainability (Harvard Business School Press, 2004)[1].
During his time in business consulting, Moore served on the boards of several companies and organizations, including two public companies and AT&T's corporate venture fund. He is the founder and former Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of GeoPartners Research, which he led from 1990 to 1999. GeoPartners invested in and consulted to companies whose strategies required change in large scale systems, including AT&T, AT&T Bell Laboratories, Intel, Intel Capital, Hewlett-Packard, Softbank Group, Qualcomm, Motorola, Johnson & Johnson, Jim Henson Productions, GE Capital, and Royal Dutch Shell.
[edit] Global development
After 1990, Moore turned to global social and economic development. Seeing the power of knowledge and knowledge-based economies, he envisioned the potential of information and communication technology to empower the four billion economically-poorest people on the planet--what C.K. Prahalad calls "the bottom of the pyramid." Moore joined Harvard Law School's Berkman Center for Internet & Society from 2000 to 2004 as a Senior Fellow and founded the Open Economies Project (funded by Hewlett-Packard). Moore worked to bring attention to the legal dimension of technology and economic issues in the developing world. In 2003 he helped develop an online seminar on law, technology and economic development that was made available, by way of the web, to participants from around the world.
Moore helped form Hewlett-Packard's business unit serving the rural poor, HP World e-Inclusion, and organized and served as the chair of its international advisory board. Moore served on a number of public-private initiatives to bridge the global digital divide. He represented the business sector as a member of the United States Delegation to the G-8 Group of Nations' Digital Opportunity Task Force. He was a member of the United Nations ICT Task Force. He worked with Zoe Baird and others on the UN/Markle Foundation Global Digital Opportunity Initiative. He was a member of the Markle-sponsored group, led by Ira Magaziner, who worked with the government of South Africa on e-strategy, entrepreneurship and telecom policy initiatves.
In the spring of 2003 Moore wrote The Second Superpower Rears its Beautiful Head which explores how citizens worldwide might join through communications technology, engage international institutions, and become a transnational "second superpower" to dialogue with governments and help set global policy. Many interesting questions are raised in the process of exploring how to make this admittedly far-flung idea real. How can we best use the Internet and other communications media to promote global citizen participation? How can the relationship between global citizens and international institutions be expanded and made more effective? Moore was honored by the 4th World Forum on e-Democracy as one of the top 25 individuals, organizations and companies that are having the greatest impact on the way the Internet is changing politics.
In the Winter of 2003, 2004 Moore was Director of Internet and Information Services for the Howard Dean campaign for US President, a campaign that pioneered new approaches to the use of the Internet for large-scale political communication and organizing.
In 2004 he co-founded Passion of the Present to mobilize Internet and blogger community support for the people of Darfur, victims of genocide in Sudan. He was instrumental in the early days of Save Darfur Coalition, as well as the Genocide Intervention Network. Moore continues to be active in the long-running campaign to stop the genocide in Darfur, and to bring intervention as well as aid to protect victims of genocide worldwide. Moore is a member of the Leadership Council of Amnesty International USA.
Moore is on the Dean's Council of the Harvard School of Public Health, is a former Chair of it's the school's Advisory Board on Society and Health, and a member of the International Advisory Board of the Harvard AIDS Institute and the Harvard AIDS Initiative led by Max Essex, which conducts research on retroviruses and works to end AIDS in Africa.
[edit] Investing in knowledge
Moore has returned to his earliest roots in general systems theory and the study of co-evolution and complexity. He is interested in intellectual property, and in the role of knowledge and entrepreneurship in the global development.
On the practical side, Moore co-founded with John Palfrey Newsilike Media and NMG Technology in 2004 to focus on the creation of technology and services to encourage communication and collaboration.
[edit] Education of a dedicated generalist
Moore remembers reading Buckminster Fuller in the late 1960s, and being inspired by Fuller's call to become a dedicated generalist--which was not an oxymoron for Fuller. At the time Moore, having dropped out of college, was living in Iowa City and had been taken under the wing of neuroscientist Steven Fox. Brain studies, domes, Bucky Fuller, John Cage, Zen all seemed to be adding up to something--but how was one to get a job? How could one make a career?
Moore eventually earned his undergraduate degree from The Evergreen State College (Washington) in 1975. He credits that school's focus on "learning how to learn" and pursuing what is meaningful as providing key habits necessary to becoming an effective generalist.
During and after Evergreen Moore worked in inner-city New Haven on an intervention at Hillhouse High School that accelerated student development by combined psychology, social organizing, and environmental design. Moore's work was under the guidance of Felix R.R. Drury, the head of the Yale design program.
Moore attended the Episcopal Divinity School as an M.Div. student in 1976-1977, and lived at the school through 1979. He credits his work there with John Snow on transformative organizations and the application of and Lucien Richard (Weston Jesuit School of Theology) as providing the foundation for much of his subsequent studies.
He transferred to Harvard in 1977, where he continued his interest in the interaction of personal and organizational learning.
He was influenced deeply by Harvard psychologist and feminist Carol Gilligan, by historian of social sciences Sheldon White, and by the writings of anthropologist Gregory Bateson. He conducted research on addictive processes and their unwinding, and he carried out an ethnographic study of recovery from Alcoholism in participation in Alcoholics Anonymous. He studied learning and leadership in large-scale organizations with Donald Schon at MIT, and started what became a years-long collaboration. He worked closely on teaching and learning with C. Roland Christensen of Harvard Business School, one of the founders of modern business strategy. Moore earned a doctorate in Human Development (clinical developmental psychology) from Harvard University in 1983.
Moore continued his research as a Post-doctoral Fellow in Organizations at Stanford University in 1983-84, and as a Senior Research Associate at the Harvard Business School in 1984-85.
By 1985 Moore had found a first career, management consulting, that allowed a generalist to have a role understandable by others as a valid specialization. Starting as an apprentice to Richard Pascale, a professor at Stanford Graduate School of Business and executive advisor, Moore began working with leaders to develop their organizations. His first two clients, the senior team of AT&T and television creator Jim Henson of the Muppets, became close allies and long-time partners. Based on these relationships Moore founded GeoPartners in 1990.
