INTERVIEW:
Question 1
In your most recent book, Harmony, you explore the effects of the dawn of the
information age on employment. How do you think that industries will change? How do you
think that work is going to change? Do you think that people are going to relate
differently with the work process?
Answer
The first thing we have seen is greater mobility. The United States at the present time
destroys more jobs, I think, than any other country in the world, even today. At the same
time, unemployment is down to points which are unsustainably low. The reason is that the
functions within companies are beginning to disappear very quickly with the pressure of
competition, and that efficiency generates new businesses. So there is a lot of mobility
of resources from one place to another, and this efficiency builds a very healthy economy
which creates a lot of jobs. The other side of that is that it is going to be very rare
for someone to have only one job over a lifetime.
Question 2
Does this apply only to the American economy or can this be applied, in time, to other
places on earth?
Answer
I think over time it is unlikely that this will be unique to the United States. As other
countries begin to put competition in place, they are going to find the same thing. What
we have had in the past is vertical integration. Henry Ford's original factory, an
automobile factory in Michigan, the River Rouge plant, was actually fed with its own ore
ships. They went and got the iron ore from Lake Superior with exactly the right number of
steam shovels to dig the ore, the right number of ore ships to fill the blast furnaces,
the blast furnaces filled open hearth furnaces, they went to rolling mills, stamping
mills, car assembly, and they ran the thing up; they did everything from end to end.
Vertical integration doesn't work anymore. You find that the new automobile factories in
places like Brazil are very small. The new car that Mercedes is producing, for example,
much more is done by suppliers, because that way you are sure that each piece in the
operation is optimal. The constellation of suppliers keeps changing. So some suppliers
grow, some shrink. The only constant through all this is flexibility and change. I know of
no country in the world which is producing automobiles the old-fashioned way. And that
system of outsourcing simply can't sustain lifetime employment. So it becomes a much more
opportunistic way of working. That's not to say at the same time that people don't have to
make investments in their skills. You can't just bring a team together one day and assume
that you can build an airplane. People have to know the other people; there has to be
trust. Years ago construction workers would be hired for the day. They would get paid at
the end of the day, and you would get a new set. You can't do that in modern technology:
people have to work together; they have to understand their skills very deeply. So it's
not the virtual corporation, but it is the extended enterprise. It is not just every
individual coming on as a contractor, but the teams are smaller. The teams last not for
human lifetimes but product lifetimes - maybe 5 years or a decade - but not as likely as
an entire human lifetime. The time-scale has shrunk, so people change careers maybe every
decade or every few years. Company configurations change, again, over that same kind of
time-scale.
Question 3
This model of flexibility, I suppose, comes from a new way of studying. There is training
to be followed before going into the field of work. Can this be applied to other
continents, such as China or South America or even Africa, or is this limited to Western
civilization?
Answer
I think that while there are cultural differences; I don't think there are economic
differences anymore. In South America the plants are built by Toyota or what used to be
called Daimler-Benz and is now called Daimler-Chrysler. The supermarkets come from France
or from the United States. We really are talking about global corporations. We are in an
era of global corporations. I don't know of many local corporations, I don't know of
companies that protect niches. I happen to drive a Jaguar car. That is owned by Ford. It
is a wonderful car, but it is a much better car because of their access to manufacturing
processes. Perhaps Maserati or somebody will stay there, but that's a different kind of
thing. But Ferrari isn't the automobile industry. The automobile industry is Toyota or
Hyundai or Ford or Fiat. In each of those cases they follow a very similar process.
Question 4
Let's talk for a moment about the monopolies that are being created these days in the
software business. There is a war between the US government and Microsoft over the
latter's monopoly of the software industry. How do you feel about companies that dominate
a market as important as the software industry?
Answer
In that case I will quote Peter Drucker. In 1982 Peter Drucker wrote an article about
American monopolies: he said that the anti-trust bureau of the Justice Department was the
best friend big business ever had. He said the only anti-trust suits that the Justice
Department ever puts in place are the ones which are initiated by competitors; healthy
monopolies don't have competitors. The first great anti-trust breakup in the United States
was Standard Oil. Standard Oil was a kerosene monopoly, not a gasoline monopoly. The
pieces went into gasoline. They went out of an aging business into a good business. IBM
was broken up in the 1940s when they were forced out of mechanical data processing and
they went into electronic data processing. The Bell System was forced out of a single
business into a lot of competing businesses, each one of which is doing very much better.
But before it was broken up, we were already being attacked by MCI. We were losing all our
benefits. There were overseas telephones and switchboards coming in; there was MCI in the
service part. We were being attacked. The fight about Microsoft today is about Netscape
trying to see who gets to control the first image on the desktop computer. Well, PC sales
are flattening out. Within 5 years there will be more networked appliances sold to be used
on the Internet than PCs. We are talking about the end of an era, not the beginning of an
era. Monopolies usually come as technologies begin to age. So they are controlling the
operating system for personal computers. There are other markets where Microsoft is a
factor, but the one that's being fought about is right there on the desktop. Now, they
have much larger power in Microsoft Office, which has a much bigger share of the PC market
than others. But remember, in Microsoft Office, Microsoft is a healthy monopoly. They have
no other competitors. Right? In the operating system, they have competitors. Today there
is action against Intel, and guess what? They are losing market share to all the clones,
most of the US$1000 or US$500 PCs are made by their competitors. So I'm not worried. That
isn't a big issue. That is not to say that our government should not stop unfair business
practices. I think for a healthy economy you have to get rid of them. Countries which have
corrupt business practices end up losing market share, the people lose jobs, the economy
suffers. So we need an alert government. I think underlying your question was the idea
that somehow in cyberspace monopoly power is an inherent danger. I think quite the
opposite.
Question 5
Do you have any profound or serious fears about the Internet, about cyberspace, about the
cyber-generation?
Answer
I do have two fears. The first is that abstraction takes the place of reality for many
people. I think there may be a tendency even on the part of education to replace teachers
with machines. It is an easy way out of the classroom. In the United States the majority
of education employees, administrators or education-supporting entities work outside the
classroom. Teachers are the minority, which seems ridiculous to me. It may be that
computers will be another way of building bureaucracy instead of giving children what they
need, which is smaller class sizes with helpful human beings. So I think the tendency to
mechanize, the tendency to say: "What you saw, what you learned on the web, what has
been packaged for you becomes more real than what you have digested for yourself".
You look at predigested stuff only and abandon the notion of the unexpected, of the
exploration of the world. Someone asked me recently what Christmas present would I
recommend to parents who want their children to succeed in the new world? And I said
"hand tools". Because what you do with hand tools is look around, you start
picking things up and you begin to think about what might be and not what is. I can take
these little pieces of glass and I can make them into a necklace. I can take that box and
turn it upside down and make it into a wagon because I can drill holes into it. I can
create. Merely rearranging forms on the web is a much paler form of creativity. What you
end up doing is just solving combinatorial puzzles. I think we want to make sure that
people stay in the real world and don't get diverted. That's one side of it. The other
thing is that the infatuation with the computer could trap us into using a false model of
human intelligence. The idea that somehow the computer is an electronic brain or that our
biological brains are just imperfect logical number crunchers, that tries to take all the
wonderful things about the human mind and move it into an unproductive area. So those are
my two big fears.
Question 6
What has the Internet added to human knowledge, to the exploration of human boundaries?
Answer
I think that in terms of knowledge it certainly allows people to communicate better, and
so a lot of collaboration takes place which might not otherwise. As a communications
medium, I think it has value even though that's not its biggest impact today. I think its
much bigger impact is as a way of making information available. In terms of economic
operations for business I think it's done very well. Its great promises, I think, are
probably in the future, really making good on its capabilities as a very rich
communications medium.
Question 7
Do you think that it will eventually merge with television?
Answer
There certainly will be use of video on the Internet. I think there are still some types
of information which are best done in broadcast. I mean, there is nobody famous on the
Internet. When you look at access to information, things like people wanting to find out
the World Cup score or Princess Diana's funeral. The experience of being there was created
by everyone watching a television set. If someone wants to get a document, like in the
Clinton-Starr investigation, they use a different medium. They are somewhat different.
Question 8
So you believe that in the future the different media will remain separate they won't
merge?
Answer
We live in a world that is not just two networks, but I have counted probably a dozen
different networks. Some of them will use the Internet. What we call the Internet is a
family of networks all of which use a set of Internet protocols, the IP protocol. Another
way of looking at the Internet is this thing that consumers use at little or no cost,
which is another way of describing the Internet. But then there are other kinds of
networks, some of which are data networks such as for the small office users who use it
for building the equivalent of private networks so they can communicate with their
customers and suppliers. Then there are the intranets inside of large corporations, the
extranets of extended corporations. Then you have a lot of specialized networks. You have
home networks. You are going to have networks which databases will use by themselves,
which have a whole different set of formats and physical structure. So you have a lot of
different networks, in addition to the broadcast networks, and those will continue because
there is something about broadcast which leads to personality. Some years ago Andy Warhol
said everyone at some point was going to be famous for 15 minutes. What he pointed out, I
think, was very important. In a world which is increasingly homogenous, without the old
landmarks of the town you live in and the church steeple, the familiar faces, you look for
something else. Some say the Egyptians built pyramids because every year the Nile flooded
and they wanted to have something to look up to. In that way I think in our society we use
the celebrities. So the kind of attention that goes to someone like Princess Diana or John
Lennon is an enormous identification. That kind of focus in the entertainment field is
usually best done with broadcast. That is not to say that broadcast will remain alone,
because all over the world we increasingly see that when Disney produces a movie, there
can be a television program, lunch-boxes for school children, a game, a book, a record,
T-shirts, a website. Many movies have a website even before the movie is produced, so they
are more complementary than competing. But like the blind man and the elephant, at some
point you're looking in a certain direction and you see more of one than another.
Certainly, to answer you question, there will always be a very strong need for a broadcast
dimension.
Question 9
You come from space research, basically. About 30 years ago, space was a place that people
wanted to conquer and everybody was looking out into space, the Moon, to Mars, and many
movies were based on that kind of idea. It seems that people have now more returned to
earth and think more about technological solutions for our planet and for ourselves. Why
did this happen?
Answer
I think it was probably a little bit of an overreaction. The first time a rocket was
launched with a satellite people's imaginations got pretty strong. Beyond that, there was
an economic lobby, which still exists. Think of the money NASA pours into movies like Deep
Impact. They give them enormous amounts of help because they are looking for a new
mission. They give them a space shuttle and they have to have astronauts, so they'll get
rid of the asteroids or something. It's a combination of things, but the large thing is
human nature. You have something new and all of a sudden everybody gets enamored with it
and then it gets a little quieter. There was a time some years ago, before there were
powerful computers, when everyone was afraid that a computer was going to replace the
human being and rule us all. Then as computers got more powerful and more familiar, people
had much more realistic ideas. Originally, we were going to have a computer that could do
everything - the robot of 30 or 40 years ago was going to run our house and be our
teacher. Now, the role of the computer is much more to help us. I think as the technology
comes in, we have this overexpectation and then we get to a more healthy level.
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