10/7/08 Chris Meyer & Joshua Epstein

Thriving in a Volatile World

Building a lastingly adaptive enterprise

Fast, focused adaptation is crucial for seizing opportunity and counteracting threat in today's business world. But organizations also need durable stability. Chris Meyer and Josh Epstein, in separate ways that have made them sought-after consultants and analysts, have studied that conundrum.

Meyer sees applicable parallels in the biological world, and he offers six practical principles that can be implemented today - and are being implemented by companies that include Capital One and BP. He also sees the need for networks that capture new ideas and best practices from outside the four walls of the organization, and he'll show you how to create "WorkNets" that link diverse outside sources of innovation and ensure that their best ideas can gain traction within your company.

Josh Epstein is the leading practitioner of the breathtaking science of "agent based modeling": the creation on high-powered computers of artificial societies that emulate how real societies react when adaptation is required. He has helped executives and policy makers study the evolution of conflict, cooperation, markets, and organization. He will explain the policies and practices that make the difference between organizations that adapt dynamically and those that can't.

From this session you will learn, among other things, how to:

• Set in place the six practical principles that make adaptability part of your organization's genetic makeup.



• Build WorkNets that bring the best outside ideas into your company and help them overcome the "not invented here" barrier.



• Gain an overview of your company's responses to opportunity and threat.



• Adjust the key variables that drive organic adaptation.

About Christopher Meyer and Joshua Epstein

Chris Meyer is chief executive of Monitor Networks, which focuses on fostering business innovation through designing, growing, and learning from human networks. His most recent book is It's Alive: The Coming Convergence of Information, Biology, and Business, and he also wrote the bestseller Blur: The Speed of Change in the Connected Economy. He has contributed to Harvard Business Review, Sloan Management Review, Fast Company, and other top business publications.

Josh Epstein is director of the Center on Social and Organizational Dynamics at the Brookings Institution. He is the author of Growing Artificial Societies: Social Science from the Bottom Up. His Ph.D. is from MIT.

What they say:

Christopher Meyer: "No matter who you are, most of the smartest people in the world work for somebody else. That means that if you want the best input you can get, you cannot confine it to the people who work for you - with no disrespect for those who do. . . . For example, Procter & Gamble said, 'We're going to make fifty percent of our new products from ideas that were not invented here.' So Regenerist, an Oil of Olay product line that reached a billion dollars faster than any product line in history, was in part developed on the back of a couple of peptide molecules developed by a Swiss firm that P&G came across in its research. . . . [The explosion in handheld digital devices] is working very much in the way an ecology works, except faster by a factor of ten-to-the-ninth-power or so. What this tells us is that some of the rules of evolution apply to the rules of innovation. If you want to innovate rapidly, you need a lot of diversity in the inputs."

Joshua Epstein: "If you didn't grow it, you didn't explain it. That is the bumper sticker reduction of the agent-based computational model. . . . The agent-based model is user-friendly. We've designed a whole portal for the National Institutes of Health, and there's also a private website where NIH can run models if a bug shows up in, say, Pittsburgh, to determine whether they should close the schools. Aside from being of scientific merit it's also got some nice features from the point of view of policy impact. . . We don't collapse the entire society into a representative agent who optimizes or does something else. Every single agent in the system is explicitly represented. They can differ in all kinds of ways, including wealth, social network, memory, genetics, cultural affiliations, decision rules and so on. They are autonomous. They obey their own rules and regulations and move around their environment under their own power. Unlike homo economicus, the agents in our models interact with family, friends, and others in social networks."

To Learn More

Two video interviews with Christopher Meyer (of roughly ten minutes each) can be viewed at www.monitortalent.com/talent/profile_meyer_video.html. Hear a podcasted interview with him, "The Power of Networks," at www.businessweek.com/mediacenter/podcasts/innovation.

You can read an article about Eptstein's work at www.abtassociates.com.

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