Whatever Happened to Globalization?

If that's how you feel, don't be surprised when talented people from Stanford or Kellogg or Harvard Business School flock to Silicon Valley. Everyone has heard of Moore's Law -- the proposition that computer chips will keep getting faster and cheaper over time. There's a Moore's Law of generations too: Younger people are so much more at ease with digital technologies than older people -- they relate so much more naturally to the Web -- that the difference between someone in his or her fifties and someone in his or her twenties can be absolutely profound.

Oracle, working with a couple of our companies, recently surveyed senior European executives about their attitudes toward the Net and toward digital technology. How big an impact did they expect those things to have on their business? How up to speed did they feel? On the whole, these executives had quite a relaxed attitude. There was no real sense of urgency. I think that the roots of this attitude are generational. Most people who run big European companies are in their fifties or early sixties. They're going to be retiring in 5 or 10 years. Why would they want to mess with radical change at this stage of their career? Of course, as Nicholas Negroponte of the MIT Media Lab likes to say, the next generation of leaders is just three 5-year plans away from taking power.

William C. Taylor is a founding editor of Fast Company. You can reach Martin Sorrell by email (msorrell@wpp.com), or visit WPP Group PLC on the Web (www.wpp.com).