Dr. James F. Moore is an expert in leadership and innovation, and former fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society. Jim is a noted business strategist, and pioneered the concept of “business ecosystems” as an approach to business strategy combining insights from evolutionary and complexity theory, as well as cognitive science. This approach has become a dominant design for strategy-making today.
Jim is a blogger, and is excited to be part of the movement of citizen journalists and open journalism in the United States and around the world.
Jim served for many years as a Senior Fellow at Harvard Law School, as a member of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society. He worked at Harvard to promote digital enterpreneurs in the developing world, particularly in Africa. He was an advisor to the government of South Africa, and was particularly active in the ICT community in Ghana. His special focus was on telecom consolidation and the market power threat of large companies against small companies in Africa. Overall, Jim brought attention to the legal dimension of technology and economic issues in the developing world.
While at Harvard, Jim was a member of the United States Delegation to the G-8 Group of Nations’ Digital Opportunity Task Force and was an advisor to the United Nations ICT Task Force. He was the founding Chair of the Board of Hewlett-Packard’s business unit serving the rural poor, HP World e-Inclusion, and was a member of the United Nations & Markle Foundation Global Digital Opportunity Initiative, and of its e-strategy consultation to the South African government.
In the spring of 2003 Jim 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? What is the role for “emergent democracy” and NGOs and other citizens’ groups in shaping society? 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, for the publication of this paper.
In the Winter of 2003, 2004 Jim took temporary leave from Harvard and served as Director of Internet and Information Services for the Howard Dean campaign for US President, a campaign that innovated many new approaches to the use of the Internet for large-scale political communication and organizing.
From 1990 to 1999 Jim was the founder and Chairman and CEO of GeoPartners Research, a strategy consulting and investment firm. GeoPartners advised and invested in small entrepreneurial companies, as well as advising large companies whose strategies required change in large scale systems. The later included 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.
Jim authored the best-selling book The Death of Competition: Leadership and Strategy in the Age of Business Ecosystems (HarperBusiness, 1996). The Wall Street Journal awarded the book five stars and selected it as one of the top books for entrepreneurs published this decade. His earlier Harvard Business Review article “Predators and Prey: A New Ecology of Competition” won the McKinsey Award for best article of 1993. Jim’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.
Jim believes that one of the most powerful ways to understand leadership and strategy is to analyze the thought patterns, metaphors, and analytical techniques of leaders and leading teams themselves, and understand their success in the context of the organizations and markets in which they participate. Thus Jim made a substantial personal investment in understanding cognition and organizations. He earned a doctorate in Human Development (clinical developmental psychology) from Harvard University in 1983. He worked closely with Donald Schon of MIT, one of the world’s experts at “reflective practice.” Jim conducted research and worked closely with C. Roland Christensen of Harvard Business School, one of the founders of modern business strategy. Jim 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. In 1984 Jim joined with John Sviokla, then a doctoral candidate and subsequently a faculty member at the school, to found the Center for Expert Systems to address strategy and cognition in business. CES helped develop the core strategic thinking that informed the founding of GeoPartners as a strategy consultancy in 1990.
He attended Williams College (Massachusetts) and earned his undergraduate degree from The Evergreen State College (Washington) in 1975. Jim remains active as an Evergreen alumni, has served as a member of the board of the alumni endowments, and has received Evergreen’s lifetime award for his work on behalf of the school.
Jim contributes time to initiatives in the human rights and global health and economic development arenas. Jim is an active supporter of the Harvard School of Public Health, a former Chair of its Advisory Board on Society and Health, and a member of the International Advisory Board of the Harvard AIDS Institute, which works primarily with AIDS in Africa. He is a member of the Leadership Council of Amnesty International USA.
