Face forward: Hey, watch where you're going, Buddy! Opportunity abounds on the road ahead

Entrepreneur, Nov, 2001 by Mark Henricks

EVER WONDER WHAT WILL FOLLOW THE INTERNET AS the next huge opportunity? Do your ever stop wondering? Juan Enriquez offers some ideas in As the Future Catches You (Crown). Enriquez, director of Harvard Business School's Life Sciences Project, says the most important business language today isn't English; it's genetics. The economic revolution wrought by our growing understanding of the genome will, Enriquez says, outpace even the growth of the computing revolution's early years.

Many gene-related business opportunities will arise from a revolution in health care. For example, Enriquez predicts opportunities in the area of preventions as opposed to cures. Enriquez also foresees information processing benefiting from powerful biological computers and disciplines from medicine to robotics employing tiny machines created using nanotechnology.

He doesn't stop with technology either, positing great social unrest as nations split, underprivileged groups rebel and boundaries crumble, influenced by unprecedented shifts of wealth and power.

The book is oddly formatted, with type in many sizes and generous white space, but it reads easily enough-and I'd bet some of the most successful companies of the next decade will from opportunities sketched out here.

GOTTA HAVE PRIORITIES

THE AGENDA (CROWN), THE LAST FROM MICHAEL Hammer, co-author of Reengineering the Corporation (HarperBusiness), presents nine principles for a new world of business. Today, he says, there must be collaboration between companies and control of internal business processes. He contends measurement must be part of every manager's life. Most important, customers, are in control. Hammer's acronym ETDBW, standing for Easy To Do Business With, is a rallying cry for the easy-to-understand principles he presents.

Austin, Texas, writer MARK HENRICKS has covered business and technology for leading publications since 1981.