Voyage to the New Economy

But the morning's most startling moment comes when Holliday stops to chat with living.com's team of Web writers and asks what they are working on. At first, they cover all of the things that he expects: new copy to promote gardening supplies, perky descriptions of sofas and the like. But then, with an impish grin, Web writer Roger Munford confesses that he has been creating the latest installment of "Dead Men Don't Decorate,'' an elaborate Raymond Chandler spoof in which a slinky female detective chases furniture counterfeiters. No one asked Holliday or anyone else in senior management for permission to launch the story; the writers just decided to sneak it into an unnoticed corner of the "magazine" section of living.com's Web site.

Another CEO might have fired the rogue writers on the spot -- or at least asked them in ultra-intimidating tones to justify this use of time and resources. But Holliday just smiles. "Ah, you writers!'' he says. He lets them carry on with their mischief and heads back to his office for a strategy session with his chief financial officer.

Such adventures are all part of running a Web business -- and perhaps even part of what attracted Holliday to living.com in the first place. "I love change. I love chaos. I love ambiguity,'' he says. "As soon as the road is clear, I need to do something different. Even if I'm looking at a golden path, I get bored.'' He pauses for a moment and then whispers, "I have a history of this.''

In 10 months on the job, Holliday has surrounded himself with other big-company refugees who also came looking for excitement. His chief marketing officer, Janet Mitchell, used to work at Duracell. His financial officer, Jay Shreiner, was at Kellogg Co. His chief Web officer, John Clendening, arrived from First Union Corp. And his head of merchandising, Helaine Suval, was recruited from Avon.

To Holliday's delight, wooing top talent to a small, unprofitable Austin company has proven to be far easier than he had predicted. He managed to pry human-relations chief Peter McCue, for example, out of a top job at Motorola with just one phone call. "I had been trying for years to get Peter to come work for me at Guinness," Holliday says. "I couldn't quite land him. But in living.com, he saw an opportunity to create a model company for the 21st century. We had the outlines of a deal within an hour of our first conversation.'' In some cases, Holliday acknowledges, he is helped by a public belief that there isn't much time left. If people want to make a big splash in the Internet economy, he suggests, they had better get started now, before most of the best jobs are taken and most of the industry-defining companies are fully staffed.

From the start, Holliday and his team have made decisiveness one of their cardinal virtues. Job candidates typically are given a week or less to decide whether they want to work at living.com. At many Web-team meetings, managers begin by "time-boxing" a decision. They give themselves a 30- or 90-minute period to decide what to do, agreeing to make some decision -- any decision -- before that interval expires. Staff debates become terse and even caustic, but that's just fine. Even junior employees are allowed to interrupt a long-winded speaker with a two-word epithet -- "Rat hole!" -- when they believe that time is being wasted.

"Speed matters in this business,'' says John Clendening, 37, living. com's chief Web officer. "We've learned to focus enough on what's right'' -- even if more time and more data could lead to a more finely crafted alternative weeks later. Better to take some action fast and recalibrate later than to let precious time tick away.

The belief that change -- and decisiveness -- can be good for their own sakes harkens back, in some ways, to the popular beliefs of the mid-19th century, when westward migration was at its peak. Social commentator Horace Greeley, who popularized the phrase "Go West, young man,'' wrote in 1871: "Most men are by migration rendered more energetic and aspiring; thrown among strangers, they feel the necessity of exertion as they never felt it before. Needing almost everything and obliged to rely wholly on themselves, they work in their new homes as they never did in their old, and the consequences are soon visible all around them.''

But such enthusiastic commitment to change always sounds a little better from a distance than it does up close. On the whole, people crossing the Atlantic or populating the American West in the 19th century did find a better life. But during any given week, they might be battling hunger, disease, flooding, or a thousand other problems, big and small. In much the same way, the pioneers of the Web economy aren't always cushioned from the shocks of the wider world -- or from human temperament.