Do not raise your voice at the dippy travel agent who stranded you in Atlanta for four hours. Congratulate your broker on his new Land Rover, even while your portfolio sags. Ignore the insurance rep's greasy sales pitch between holes on your golf game. These people are toast.
They're rarely mentioned in articles celebrating the new economy: the e-conomy, Netconomy, i-economy—terms as inflated as colored balloons at a company picnic. The story is invariably fablelike. The details are invariably murky.
Truth is, no one knows how we'll reach that rosy future or who will be turned into toads along the way. What's clear is that for every business opportunity the Web creates, an existing industry will take a hit. The coroner's report offers practical clues about how to position your company for the new economy. A stroll through the morgue can only make you wiser.
You thought Alan Greenspan just needed more fiber in his diet. What else could account for the fed chairman's tight-lipped testimonies and dour demeanor? He's been at terrible pains to explain how the economy can sustain high growth, high employment, and low inflation.
He doesn't know. Nor does anyone else. The federal government is good at collecting statistics, but the Internet has sacked conventional notions about how the gears and levers of the economy work. Dell Computer, for example, rightly considers itself a direct marketer, its $1 billion a year in Web sales pulled directly from its customers. Yet to federal number crunchers, Dell is a manufacturer.
Whole swaths of Web-based business-to-business transactions fail to register at all in federal statistics. The distinction between advertising and content on the Net continues to blur, though you'd never guess that from a content provider's P&L statement. Companies everywhere are shedding assets—Marriott sells its hotels while retaining management contracts on them; Chrysler outsources for components, shuttering factories but raising output; Schwab.com swallows its brick-and-mortar parent. In the process, these companies are transforming whole industries.
The economy is good by any measure. But managers must be forgiven for feeling as if they're suddenly navigating by the stars. Is the situation as bad as it seems? For many industries, it's worse. Just beyond today's plush profits lies an ambush. Numerous big corporations will succumb. Many more will be swallowed or transformed. Jobs will be lost, careers eviscerated. Fortunes will vanish. Oh woe, oh woe.
