State of the New Economy

What do I worry about? Pace. Everything is so frenzied right now. I'm not sure that we stop -- or even slow down -- often enough to think about what we're doing, to try to balance our work with our lives.

Startup hours are hectic. They have to be: To compete effectively, you have to work very hard. But while that's great for commerce, it's not sustainable on a personal level. And it can't be good for society.

Krishna Subramanian (Krishna@kovair.com) cofounded Kovair Inc. -- named for the Sanskrit word for the Hindu god of prosperity -- in April 1999 to help companies coordinate their relationships with key customers. Before starting Kovair, she worked at Sun Microsystems, where she helped design the strategy that made Java a platform for business users. She holds five patents from her work as Sun.

Pehong Chen

Founder, Chairman, President, and CEO
Broadvision Inc.
Redwood City, California

Power to the customer! Finally, companies are really starting to think from the outside in, instead of thinking from the inside out.

Consider this: Instead of starting with what you do and how you do it, you start with what the customer needs. Then you move to the possible solution to those needs. Then you start thinking about the paths that might lead to those solutions. What have you done? You've turned "business as usual" on its head. You've taken something that might have been a dreary little transaction and made it exciting -- something that you can add brain power to and that you can come away from knowing that you made a difference.

That's what's so awesome about the new economy. You have the ability to do something with your work and to know that you made a difference. You. Not your system. Not you company's policies. You.

The downside? In the flurry of excitement over all of the ideas that are bouncing around and all of the money that's so suddenly part of the picture, too many people have built up unrealistic expectations about making it big, and they're going to get beat up.

I'm not one to dwell on the negative, though. Nothing keeps me up at night. By the time I go to bed, I'm totally exhausted. Yes, companies will be weeded out. Not everyone who leaps out of the starting gate will make it to the finish line. But the competition -- will make the best ideas and the best companies even stronger.

Before starting BroadVision Inc. -- a company that specializes in personalized e-business application -- in 1993, Pehong Chen was vice president of multimedia technology at Sybase Inc., where he was responsible for the company's interactive-technology initiatives.

Thomas W. Malone

Professor
Sloan School of Management, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Cambridge, Massachusetts

We have an opportunity to invent a new world -- collectively. And we can make it better than the existing world, not just in a narrowly economic sense but also in a broader human sense: for ourselves and for our children and for our children's children.

For instance, new information technologies and new ideas about management are bringing us to a place where we can consider radically new ways of organizing work. It may be possible to create companies that give employees a better sense of achievement, of camaraderie, or of autonomy than ever before.

That's tremendously exciting.

What worries me is the possibility that we'll create a world that is much more economically efficient -- but that is much less satisfying to live in -- than the one that e inhabit today.

Right now, when you hear the words "new economy," you probably think of dotcoms and extraordinary wealth. But you probably don't think of personal satisfaction. I'm worried that we won't bring the personal side of the equation up to the level of the financial side.

I also worry about people who live and work in developing countries. It's clear that the economy is becoming more global. But the jury is still out on whether the developing world will be integrated into the developed world in a thoughtful and fair way, or in a way that exploits and oppresses people.

We have a historical opportunity -- perhaps even a historical obligation -- to make wise choices about how we move forward.

I just hope we don't blow it.

Thomas W. Malone (malone@mit.edu) is the Patrick J. McGovern Professor of Information Systems at the MIT Sloan School of Management. he is also the founder and director of the MIT Center for Coordination Science and was one of the two founding codirectors of the five-year MIT research initiative "Inventing the Organizations of the 21st Century."