This is the archived SXSW 2012 schedule. Please see the current schedule here.

Explorations in Corporate Zoology

#sxsw #corpzoo

Normally, we think about businesses as a mere collection of people working together. But, organizations also collectively act as a unit, facing the needs of survival and competing with others for resources. To that end, could we think about corporations and organizations as a unique sort of living, breathing species onto itself?

This talk explores the latest research in the field of “corporate zoology,” which brings evolutionary theory and ecological science to better understand how businesses evolve and interact with one another. We’ll delve into efforts by corporate naturalists to understand how different businesses evolve adaptations over time in the form of departments, professionalization, and the pattern of investment. It will also explore the insights emerging from the assembly of a comprehensive “animal kingdom” classification for businesses.

It’s going to be Jacques Cousteau meets the Wall Street Journal. Dawkins meets Microsoft. Darwin meets Enron. It’s going to be awesome.

Listen

Presenters

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Tim Hwang Partner Robot Robot & Hwang

Tim Hwang is a partner at Robot, Robot & Hwang, a San Francisco-based legal research and development firm specializing in the replacement of puny hoo-man lawyers with computers. He is also the co-founder of ROFLCon, a conference about web culture, memes, and internet celebrity. He is also is a founding trustee of the Awesome Foundation for the Arts and Sciences, a worldwide organization devoted to small-scale community financing to projects that support the interest of awesomeness in the universe. He twitters @timhwang and blogs inconsistently at brosephstalin.com.

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