Harvard Business School Alumni Bulletin

Rebooting the Human Condition

by Garry Emmons

The future is so yesterday.

It's already here, and everywhere around us. The problem is, most of us just can't see it. Fortunately, the future is on exhibit this week, and Juan Enriquez (MBA '86) will be our docent.

A widely hailed “futurist,” Enriquez has received, along with Bill Gates, an unprecedented invitation to be a guest curator at the 2011 TED (Technology Entertainment and Design) conference, which kicks off today (February 28) in California. TED, whose theme this year is “The Rediscovery of Wonder,” is an annual gathering of visionaries and doers that focuses on creativity, imagination, and Next Big Things. At the 2009 conference, in a talk of 18 minutes (the maximum time allowed for all TED speakers), Enriquez explained clearly and humorously how civilization will soon undergo a “reboot” through the conjunction of engineered cells, biological tissue, and robots. This perfect storm of innovation will allow humans to shape their own evolution (as well as that of other species) and create solutions to energy, health, and economic problems.

Enriquez puts his money where his mouth is: as president and CEO of Synthetic Genomics, a company that is developing genomics-driven solutions for major global issues, he partnered with and was a major funder of the J. Craig Venter Institute's recent breakthrough, the creation of the first synthetic bacterial cell.

Enriquez says that after thinking about it for almost a year, he put together a TED panel titled “Threads of Discovery,” whose panelists include a neuroengineer, a surgeon, an artist, a biomedical engineer, an energy expert, and a hematologist. “It's an incredible opportunity to showcase some of the world's great brains and talent,” Enriquez says. “I was looking for quirky characters, with extraordinary visions, who can make people feel that what they do should make you smile and think.”

The epitome of an outside-the-box thinker, Enriquez boasts a lineage reaching far back into prominent families in both Mexico and New England. Thus he has been equally at home negotiating with Mexican guerrillas and sailing the world's oceans (with genomics guru Venter, among others). From 1988 to 1993, Enriquez served as CEO of Mexico City's for-profit urban development agency. Later, as an HBS senior research fellow, Enriquez was a founder and director of the HBS Life Sciences project. More recently, he joined Venter at various stages of Venter's global sailing voyage, collecting marine organisms for their DNA to expand genomic knowledge.

Enriquez is the author of As the Future Catches You; The Untied States of America; and a recently published e-book (with former Harvard Medical School faculty member Steve Gullans), Homo Evolutis: A Short Tour of Our New Species.

Enriquez cites as particular influences HBS professors Ray Goldberg on agribusiness as a global system, Bruce Scott on international economics, and Row Moriarity in industrial marketing. At HBS, he says, he learned to “rapidly triage and integrate a lot of information from multiple sources” with “uncertainty being part of the package.” One thing is not uncertain: Sea change is under way, and Juan Enriquez, like the early navigators of terra incognita, is mapping the contours of a once unimaginable, soon-to-be familiar world.