My first job was cleaning the grease off the hot-dog roaster at the carousel snack bar, near my home in Buffalo. Actually, it wasn't a roaster. It was more a series of nails that rotated under a lightbulb. I also had to make the coffee and scrub the place clean every night. it very quickly became obvious to me that I didn't have much of a future in food service.

I didn't have to make many decisions in my job. And the manager of the store didn't exactly look to me to initiate change. In fact, she didn't want anyone to initiate change. (My suggestion that we branch out into frozen yogurt fell on deaf ears, as did my plea that it would be a lot cheaper to boil hot dogs on demand than to keep them on the rack under the lightbulb all day.)

Any change, any innovation, any risk at all would lead to some sort of terrible outcome for her, she believed.

After I set a record by breaking three coffee carafes in one shift, my food-service career was over. I was out on the street, unemployed at the tender age of 16. But from that first job, I learned a lot -- and those lessons keep getting reinforced.

Just about every day, I go to a meeting where I meet my boss from the snack bar. Okay, it's not really her. But it's someone just like her: a corporate middle-person who's desperately trying to reconcile the status quo with a passionate desire to survive. My boss didn't want to jeopardize her job. She viewed every day and every interaction not as an opportunity but as a threat -- a threat not to the company but to her own well-being. If she had a mantra, it was "Don't blow it."

In her business, she faced two choices: to die by the guillotine, a horrible but quick death, or to perish slowly on the rack -- which is just as painful a way to go, if not more so, and guaranteed to leave you every bit as dead. But in her nightmares, only one of those two options loomed large -- the guillotine.

I have to admit it. I have the same dream.

Have you ever spent a night worrying about what your boss (or your stockbroker or a big customer) is going to say to you at that meeting the next morning? Have you ever worried about some impending moment of doom? That's fear of the guillotine.

But almost no one worries about the rack. We don't quake in our boots about a layoff that's going to happen two years from now if we don't migrate our systems before our competition does. We're not afraid of stagnating and dying slowly. No, we're more afraid of sudden death, even though the guillotine is probably a far better way to die.

Recently, at the invitation of the president of a company, I visited its operation in Chicago. This company is a household name, a financial-services giant. And its people know that the Internet represents a huge threat to their future.

When I get there, people are so earnest. They've all done their homework. They all take notes and ask questions. At first, it seems as if they're doing everything right to prepare for the future. They've got an Internet task force, and it reports directly to the president. It's a high-profile gig: Lots of senior people are on this team, and virtually every department in the company has a representative on it.

The team is busy hiring consultants, building prototypes, creating business models, and generally working hard to get the company in shape for the next century.