The Hitchhikers Guide to the New Economy

The History of every major Galactic Civilization tends to pass through three distinct and recognizable phases, those of Survival, Inquiry and Sophistication, otherwise known as the How, Why and Where phases. For instance, the first phase is characterized by the question How can we eat? the second by the question Why do we eat? and the third by the question Where shall we have lunch?
-- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

It's just after breakfast on a chilly London morning. and it's early on the evolutionary clock of the brand-new startup launched by Douglas N. Adams - or as he affectionately calls himself, DNA.

The author of the "increasingly inaccurately named" Hitchhiker's Trilogy - five epic science-fiction tales that are, he says, bestsellers everywhere but in France - has just left a business meeting. For a writer who until recently didn't even balance his own checkbook, that's no small thing.

Adams, 45, stands six feet three and has a nose like a rudder. (On his company's Web site, you can see a photo of that nose, in glorious profile, and read his account of the trials and tribulations of owning it.) He presses himself into a cab, bending into the kind of deep bow that comes naturally to a debutante, but not to a man as big as an elm. He settles into the hack's cavernous backseat. He wants to go to the offices of the Digital Village (TDV) - the company he founded in 1992, home to 20 bright young TDVers, the centerpiece of his "21st-century multimedia company."

What ensues instead is a long, pregnant moment. The cabbie's eyes float up to his rearview mirror and lock into a stare that would set a stick on fire. The sun is shining. The passenger remains inert.

This is not a good place for nothing to be going on.

"Sir?" the driver ventures. "Sir? I'm 'appy to sit 'ere as long as you like. Only, do you mind if I turn the meter on?"

"Oh, yes!" the passenger says, snapping into consciousness. He utters TDV's address. Douglas Adams knows where he wants to go, but it's much better if someone else is driving. He is, after all, the ultimate hitchhiker.

Five years ago, Adams threw his hat into an already crowded ring: He decided to become the next Walt Disney. "I got lonely spending all day sitting in a room by myself, trying to be funny in front of a blank screen," he says. "I wanted to do a television show and a CD-ROM, and I never had the right leverage." The Digital Village, he says, "unashamedly wants to be the biggest, most successful global entertainment company we can be, on the scale of Disney." But he promptly demurs: "There's a clear structural difference between us and Disney. We're doing CD-ROMs and movies, and we will be doing television, music, and publishing. But our central focus is on establishing direct retail relationships with customers."

Every traditional media product that TDV launches is a way to drive audiences to the company's online community. Whether it's a new book, or the movie version of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (or h2g2) that Adams is doing with Disney, or the recently released Starship Titanic game - each product is meant to link people to that community, also known as h2g2 online. Adams hopes that h2g2 online will become the source for information on books, music, travel, talk, and games. Net-jays, updating the old radio-deejay formula, will give voice to h2g2 characters offering points of view on all of this, and more.

In other words, Adams is hitchhiking, this time through the new economy. He began his adult life as a penniless wanderer, sleeping in fields and phone booths. Since then, he has learned a few unusual truths about the way the world - make that the galaxy - works.

Beware: These are not the truths taught in business school.

The old economy says, Make a plan and stick to it. The new economy is so unformed, so out of the ballpark, that the rules are different: Dream wild, stick out your thumb, and climb aboard for the ride. Don't worry too much about control. Don't drive yourself crazy driving yourself. Be loose, be open to surprise, and be cool. These are also the "rules," such as they are, of the hitchhiker. Adams wrote the book - to be precise, the book within a book - on the hitchhiker's attitude. Inscribed on its cover in large, friendly letters are these unforgettable words: Don't Panic.

They carry a lesson for every hitchhiker now traveling on the information superhighway. The best things in life happen not as planned but by accident. And by fantasy.

Fantasy is the first order of reality in the new economy. Not invention. Not new and improved assembly lines. Fantasy. Steven Spielberg rode E.T. all the way to the creation of Amblin Entertainment. Luke Skywalker's fingerprints are all over the buildings at George Lucas's Industrial Light and Magic. A cartoon mouse laid the foundation of the Disney empire.