ME and Ophelia

James F. Moore: Strategic change in large-scale organizational systems



James F. Moore studies leaders, strategies, organizational innovations, and technologies that help businesses and other organizations succeed.

He is involved in a number of ventures. Future Economies is a management consulting company focused on human resources strategies for the networked, community-based workforce and economy. Medical Information Innovation celebrates apps that benefit health and medicine, and tells the stories of the innovators and creatives who invent them. Cognition, Inc. develops radio technology for broadband mobile. Newsilike Media Group, Inc. develops social media software and hardware systems. Stylefeeder.com was purchased by Time Warner in 2010 to become the basis for that firm’s next generation integration of commerce and media.

He worked as a full-time volunteer in the campaign to stop the genocide in Darfur, Sudan in 2004-2005. He was co-founder and served for more than a year as the day-to-day editor for the web campaign “Sudan: Passion of the Present” and helped develop and sustain a number of other activist individuals and organizations including Save Darfur and the Genocide Intervention Fund/Genocide Intervention Network. These organizations are part of a broader campaign to establish a world capability to prevent or intervene to halt and recover from genocidal situations.

In 2003 and 2004 he served as the National Director of Internet and Information Services for the US Presidential Campaign of Howard Dean, overseeing all social media as well as technology infrastructure.

He wrote “The Second Superpower Rears its Beautiful Head” which considers how citizens worldwide are joining through communications technology to engage international institutions and shape global policy. The article became an Internet phenomenon and was reviewed in publications ranging from the National Journal to the New York Times. In 2004 Jim 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 worldwide.

From 2000-2004 he was a Senior Fellow at Harvard Law School, promoting legal reforms in developing countries in order to support entrepreneurship and technology diffusion. While at the law school he organized and chaired the board of Hewlett-Packard’s “E-inclusion” program to create technology for and in developing world economies. He founded the Open Economies Project to promote laws supportive of digital entrepreneurs. As part of a team sponsored by the Markel Foundation, he advised the South African Government on policies to promote digital development, including telecom law reforms. He served as a member of the United States delegation to the Digital Opportunity Task Force of the G8 Group of Nations, and was an adviser to the United Nations ICT Task Force and to the ICT initiative of the World Economic Forum.

From 1989-1999 he was the founder and CEO of GeoPartners Research, a management consulting and investment strategy firm, where his clients ranged from Muppets creator Jim Henson to AT&T, Hewlett-Packard, Intel and Royal Dutch Shell. In addition to management consulting, Jim was involved in corporate venturing on behalf of AT&T Ventures, Intel Capital, GE Capital and Softbank (the largest single investor in the Internet economy, and the only major investor to sustain its success). He also advised and invested in start up companies, and served on the board of directors of two public companies.

Jim has written widely on business topics. He developed the concept of “business ecosystems” to describe networks of companies that collaborate and co-evolve to generate economic value. His Harvard Business Review article on business ecosystems, “Predators and Prey: A New Ecology of Competition,” won the McKinsey Award for best article of the year for 1993. His 1996 book “The Death of Competition: Leadership and Strategy in the Age of Business Ecosystems” won numerous awards (“one of the ten best books of the year,” BusinessWeek, and “one of the ten best books of the decade for entrepreneurs,” Wall Street Journal) and was a best-seller. It was translated into and published in several languages including Chinese. His work was featured in publications including Fortune, BusinessWeek, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal. He appeared on national television, including being interviewed on the Charlie Rose Show on PBS.

While most of his career has been in high technology, his early work was in health care organizations. These included Boston Children’s Hospital (MA) community primary care service, Wrentham State School (MA) services for the developmentally disabled, the Bedford (MA) VA Hospital alcoholism service, the Santa Clara County (CA) mental health system, and American Medical International (CA), national health management. His doctoral thesis grew out of a multi-year study of Alcoholics Anonymous as an informal but systematic environment for community and personal healing. He has continued to follow the evolution of clinical practice under changing conditions of policy and organization, society, technology, and patient/clinician/community behavior.

He was an early friend and adviser to the Harvard AIDS Institute and the Harvard Society and Health Program (now Harvard Department of Society, Human Development and Health), and has recently become involved with the Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies.

Moore earned a doctorate in Human Development from Harvard University in 1983, where he combined studies in organizations with cognitive and developmental psychology. He was a post-doc in organizations at Stanford University, and conducted research at Stanford and Harvard business schools. He earned his undergraduate degree in 1976 from The Evergreen State College in Washington State—one of the most innovative organizations in public higher education. He is active in college affairs, and received the Bud Koons Award for Service from the college in 2006.

Moore lives in Massachusetts with his wife Sarah Moore, a lawyer and minister. He has three children, two teenagers who attend public Cambridge Rindge and Latin School, and one infant.

Labels: Historic stuff, Internet, Jim Moore, the father of fibre optics