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Peter Cochrane's Hard Drive 1999 Survival of the fITtest CORPORATE America has recently seen a rash of chief executive and board-level resignations because of a lack of computer and Internet appreciation on the part of the individuals concerned. Sadly, the companies involved are facing the dire consequences of mismanagement in markets being transformed at breakneck speed by information technology. The shareholders, workforce and managers have seen the warning signs, observed a lack of action, and then made their voices heard by voting or lobbying for change. Why didn't the unfortunate, and now departed, board members see all this coming, and take appropriate action? Why didn't they get educated and get with IT? I suspect they were mesmerised by the speed and mode of change like rabbits in the headlights of a car. Globally, there are now well over 43 million Internet hosts, with an annual growth rate of 46 per cent. We can confidently expect to see well over 100 million hosts by 2001, with around 50 per cent in America, and in excess of 30 per cent will be .com accounts. In Europe the number of hosts is about 6.5 million, ranging from Britain with 1.42 million, growing at 20 per cent a year, to Austria, Ireland, Greece, and Portugal all with fewer than 150,000 hosts, with annual growth rates as high as 30 per cent. In America there are more than 25 million Internet hosts, with a growth rate above 40 per cent, about 47 per cent of homes have at least one PC and more than 30 per cent are online. In Britain, the number of homes with at least one PC is close to 40 per cent and the number online is about 12 per cent. While these figures are impressive in the absolute sense, it is the speed of growth that is really startling. Most probably, these aspects of the IT revolution are beyond the ken of many chief executives and board members. For sure, it is all well outside their historical span. My guess is we will soon see the corporate AGM of many of our biggest and historically stable companies transformed by a largely savvy audience who know more about the computer business than the board. If so, we can expect heads to roll. Investors and shareholders would be foolish to vest the control of their financial futures with a group of individuals out of some previous, and increasingly distant and irrelevant era. If this is starting to become visible in America today, then it will be in Europe within the next year. Pondering all of this, it occurred to me that it is possible to formulate a fitness function for organisations that will rank and rate their chances of survival in the future. The formula is essentially simple and has all the positive attributes on the top line and the detrimental ones on the bottom, as follows (truncated for simplicity and clarity): Fitness = (Flexibility) x (Speed) x (Vision) divided by (Experience) Among the top-line positives are Flexibility, Speed of Response, and Vision as vital ingredients to future success. Of course, there are many other factors to be included if I had the space. On the bottom line I single out Experience as the key contributor to future failure because it is only an asset in a world that is static, and our world is now definitely dynamic. I suspect keeping fIT will never be the same again. Peter Cochrane holds the Collier Chair for the Public Understanding of Science & Technology at the University of Bristol. His home page is: |
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