2004 - A Personal Odyssey

Think back five short years -- to another time and to another reality.

On the macroeconomic front, the United States has pulled itself out of the recession of the early 1990s, but there's little to suggest that a fundamental transformation is on its way. Productivity is improving slightly, and inflation is taking a small dip -- the kind of modest adjustments that happen all the time. Nothing to get excited about.

Economists and business pundits suggest that these mild improvements might owe something to the cost-cutting going on in the nation's largest companies. Reengineering is a booming business, heralding a full-employment act for the consulting industry, a promise of addition by subtraction for corporate chiefs: outsource, downsize, rightsize, lay off, de-layer, restructure. It's a simple math exercise: Juicing your stock price and becoming more competitive is as easy as lopping off the parts that don't add value. Workers say it's the death of corporate loyalty, the end of the social compact that was forged in the crucible of the Industrial Revolution. But companies see it as just the Next Big Thing -- the off-the-shelf technique that everyone's reaching for. And, the argument goes, if you don't do it and your competitor does, you're left out in the cold. When AT&T announces that it's cutting 15,000 jobs, it's pretty clear that Ma Bell has sounded the death knell of permanent employment in the United States. There's outrage and sadness and a tinge of regret, but there's no mistaking the corporate signals going out to employees across the land: It's time to accept the fact that careers are changing and that no job lasts forever.

The other big idea that's in the air is globalization. The same pundits who are taken with corporate downsizing are struck by the worldwide proliferation of economic models. Asian capitalism is looking particularly robust. Its combination of heavy-handed national-industrial policy, strict social control, and widespread literacy and education programs suggests that the Pacific Rim is claiming a larger and larger piece of the future. Meanwhile, the forward-looking economic forces in Europe are gathering strength to erase the increasingly obsolete boundaries of the past and to create a unified Europe -- a market of unparalleled potency, with its own unified currency and its own set of rules for continentwide competitiveness. The future looks like a horse race among competing national economic models, three varieties of capitalism -- each testing the others to see what blend of government policy, social understanding, and political freedom can produce the best results.

At the same time, there are these hints and suggestions -- nothing too serious mind you, just something a little, well, different in the air: a batch of not-ready-for-prime-time ideas about information technology, new work practices, a generational power shift, and a growing gender parity in business and in the market.

But it's too soon to get excited. Despite the three competing models of capitalism, there's still only one economy, so there's no talk about the old economy and the new economy: It's just the economy: You know, the one where the laws of decreasing returns, perfect information, and rational decision making all apply. If some people are starting to communicate by email, and others are experimenting with the World Wide Web, and still others are trying to capitalize on satellite communications and the 24-by-7 world of telecommunications, well, that's all very interesting -- but not yet revolutionary.

It's true that some new tools are showing up in the office: Things are getting digital, personal, portable. Some people are showing up at work with beepers on their belts, cell-phones in their pockets, and laptops in their briefcases. Come to think of it, PCs have become commonplace in the office -- and even the boss has figured out that they're more than an electronic paperweights. In Redmond and in Palo Alto, in Dallas and in Austin, a few folks are talking about the convergence of software, hardware, and computing in a way that could dramatically alter, well, everything! And those folks have the personal wealth and the hypercompetitive mind-sets to prove it. But still, how different could things really get? After all, nobody's repealed the laws of economics, right?

Well, maybe they have.

Blink your eyes, and five years ago becomes today. Speed supplants stability; innovation overtakes predictability. Reengineering is ancient history; top-line growth is the order of the day. And the new economy is everywhere -- so much so that there's even a new spelling for the dismal science: e-conomy. Those old, time-honored laws haven't exactly been repealed, but how exactly do you explain higher productivity, lower unemployment, and zero inflation, Mr. Greenspan?