The Hitchhikers Guide to the New Economy

The qualities [that a president] is required to display are not those of leadership but those of finely judged outrage. ... His job is not to wield power but to draw attention away from it. - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

Stamp's task is every bit as daunting as Adams's - maybe more so. As chairman and CEO, Stamp is charged with building a company that is as creative as its chief fantasist. His most difficult job: building it in a way that conforms to the company's unofficial policy manual. Consider what can happen in the time zone known to most of us as six o'clock on an average Thursday evening. It's a time when not only TDV's policy manual but also the behavior of its people can seem to be drawn precisely, insanely from the pages of h2g2.

The scene unfolds: A man dressed only in a T-shirt and a bikini is buzzed inside the TDV suite. He goes straight to the CEO's office. Stamp gathers up his papers and heads for the door. The stranger shoves the boss's desk to one side and tunes his boom box to loud rock. Is he leading a hostile takeover? A putsch? Or just an alien invasion?

For the next hour, the CEO of TDV is stranded on the outside looking in, while half the TDV staff uses his office for its aerobic workout. Other Londoners are repairing to loved ones - or to pubs. But TDVers, now getting their second wind, are preparing to work half the night. Shimmying employees stop only to towel off the sweat from their backs.

TDV is a very special company, and Stamp is a very special leader. Never have the two disciplines - soul and matter - come together in a finer blend. "I'm TDV's chief servant," Stamp says. "Anybody who thinks he can sit at the top of a complex organization is kidding himself. The complexity is so great, you can never get on top of it, even in a small company."

Stamp aims to turn TDV into "a home for people who never much liked home." The success of the company, he says, rests with the people on its young team. They have to be more creative than Adams. They have to be better at management than Stamp. TDV's mission is to come as close as possible to dissolving the barrier between producers and consumers. The more hip and conscious and honest its people are, the more those qualities will be mirrored in its customers. On h2g2 online, consumers will mingle with producers until it becomes virtually impossible to tell who's who.

"We spend a lot of time talking about the genetic coding we put into the company," says Stamp. "The appropriate behaviors have to be coded in from the company's earliest days. Our issues are how to communicate effectively and to achieve cost discipline and deadline discipline now - so that nobody later looks back and says, 'Wasn't it a lot freer and happier and easier in the old days? Now some horrible manager is imposing a deadline on me, or managing the cash.' If the right behaviors are part of the genetic coding from the beginning, you don't have to impose them later."

Part of Stamp's genetic coding involves teaching TDVers about management. He explains the company's systems to them in detail, and they learn to practice management on each other. You might think that the artists, designers, and writers who represent the bulk of TDV's staff would rather spit at the word of "management" than speak it. But these kids talk the language of business with both skill and enthusiasm. It forms a bond that they share across various disciplines, and it helps them understand how they can get what they need to do their jobs. That way, Stamp figures, he doesn't have to do their thinking for them.

And he has time for his second-most-difficult job: fund-raising.

In moments of great stress, every life form that exists gives out a tiny subliminal signal [that] communicates an exact and almost pathetic sense of how far that being is from the place of his birth. On Earth it is never possible to be farther than sixteen thousand miles from your birthplace ... so such signals are too minute to be noticed. - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

You can imagine a galaxy. you can imagine a two-headed, totally out-to-lunch ex-hippy. But it's much harder to imagine money into existence.

Like most rides into outer space, this one's gotten bumpy. TDV's key product, the software game Starship Titanic - originally due to launch in time for Christmas 1997, then postponed until January 1998 - has finally emerged. Some 100,000 copies are headed for the United States, with another 60,000 appearing worldwide.

"Hubris," says Stamp, explaining why the launch's hoped-for leap to warp speed has been slow in coming. "It's been hard to raise the money," he explains. "We wanted to do more than we could. In the end, Starship Titanic has been a monumental effort. It's taken most of the company's energy to date. TDV has focused down quite substantially."