ATOMICReforming the Business Landscape into the New Structures of Tomorrow

Roger Camrass and Martin Farncombe

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ATOMIC

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ATOMICReforming the Business Landscape into the New Structures of Tomorrow

Roger Camrass and Martin Farncombe

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Copyright © Roger Camrass and Martin Farncombe 2003.

The rights of Roger Camrass and Martin Farncombe to be identifi ed as the authors of this book have been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published 2004 byCapstone Publishing Limited (a Wiley Company)The Atrium Southern GateChichesterWest Sussex PO19 8SQwww.wileyeurope.com

All Rights Reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning or otherwise, except under the terms of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 or under the terms of a licence issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency Ltd 90 Tottenham Court Road, London, W1P 0LP, UK, without the permission in writing of the Publisher. Re-quests to the Publisher should be addressed to the Permissions Department John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, The Atrium, Southern Gate, Chichester, West Sussex PO19 8SQ, England, or e-mailed to permreq@wiley.co.uk, or faxed to (44) 1243 770571.

CIP catalogue records for this book are available from the British Library and the US Library of Congress.

ISBN 1-84112-116-9

Typeset in 11/15pt Goudy Old Style by Sparks Computer Solutions Ltd, Oxford, UK(http://www.sparks.co.uk)

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Substantial discounts on bulk quantities of Capstone Books are available to corporations, professional associations and other organizations. For details telephone John Wiley & Sons on (+44-1243-770441), fax (+44-1243-770571) or e-mail CorporateDevelopment@wiley.co.uk

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http://www.wileyeurope.com

Contents

Foreword viiPreface xiiiAcknowledgements xvii

1 The Countdown Begins 1

Part 1 Causes 17

2 New Wave Connections 193 Land of the Giants 39

Discontinuity 55

Part 2 Collapse 59

4 What is an Atom? 61

Part 3 Consequences 81

5 Winning Strategies on the Atomic Road 836 Atomic Me! 1017 Industrial (R)evolution 117

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v i C O N T E N T S

Part 4 Changes 139

8 Relational Capital 1419 Keep the Best and Ditch the Rest 16410 Big Is Not Beautiful 18311 Change IT! 19612 Atomize Now! 213

Part 5 Corporate Re-formation 233

13 Corporate Re-formation 235

Index 243

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Foreword

by Chris Meyer, author of Blur and It’s Alive

For the past hundred years or so, the fastest growing economies have chosen to organize themselves into corporations as the most effi cient means of production. And since most of us reading this book have grown up in that context, it’s easy for us to think it will always be so, just as feudal serfs, guild members and farmers did in their respective times. The technologies that have transformed value creation will likewise revolutionize economic org anization, thereby shifting power from institutions to the talent they rely on.

The most important innovation of the Industrial Revolution was not a technology such as the Bessemer steel-making process or the Newcomen steam engine – it was the legal creation of limited liability enterprises – corporations. Why? Because it mobilized the fl ow of capital, which was a scarce resource in the late nineteenth century.

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v i i i F O R E W O R D

A blacksmith might have started a business based on his family’s savings, or on what could be borrowed from the village he would serve. However, Andrew Carnegie needed fi nancial capital on a different scale and it’s no accident that his name is connected to that of Paul Mellon, the founder of the bank that funded US Steel. The growth of the banking system and the ability to fund industrial-scale projects were enabled by the development of the corporate form of organization.

The power of this new economic species proved almost too great. The industrial technologies that corporations developed on a mass scale – such as chemistry, electricity and mass production – created so much value and required so much capital that they eventually acquired enormous leverage. In fact, they accumulated power so rapidly that democratic societies had to create new institutions to curb it. First came the antitrust laws, then the labour movement and associated legal frameworks. Most recently, it has been consumerism that has again reduced the corporations’ room for manoeuvre. Even so, the corporation seems to be gaining ground as global enterprises take on capabilities that used to belong to governments. Few central banks, for example, can compete with Citicorp in currency markets. What could change this picture of growing corporate dominance?

The traditional corporation got a bit of a frisson from the dot-com boom. Right now, of course, that fear has become a sneer as Aeron chairs, the em-blematic furniture of Silicon Valley, can be picked up for next to nothing at auctions and individual ‘free agency’ looks more scary than liberating. But this does not mean the corporation is safe.

Clayton Christensen1 has recently driven home a forceful point: when a technology with truly disruptive potential fi rst emerges, it doesn’t work very well. It gets used only in niches where its specifi c advantages are strongest. The existing technology is generally too well developed and entrenched in the better-established applications to give way to the interloper in its early, crude state. Thus transistors were fi rst popularized in tinny radios because, without the transistor’s low weight and power consumption, a portable radio wasn’t possible at all, never mind that the radio sounded horrible! But the new technology learns from its niche, improves and pretty soon names like DuMont, RCA, Philco and the other vacuum-tube dependent companies have disappeared. Christensen’s conclusion is this: successful corporations

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F O R E W O R D i x

are generally managed according to the sort of rules that militate against investing in new and risky technology.

The foregoing argument relates to product technologies but it applies equally to new forms of organization. The dot-com economy, comprising small companies and free agents, bound together by their shared mastery of new networking technology and an equally shared set of values about knowledge, relationships and competition, invented an economy perfect for the rapid proliferation of information-based, non-capital-intensive businesses – this was the early niche. The collapse of many of these businesses has not wiped out this way of working, only the recent approach to getting such companies funded. And ultimately the experiences of the dot-com cohort will lead to even more startling organizational innovation, as the transistor led to the microprocessor.

The connected and fl uid labour markets that bred the dot-coms still exist, just as Internet-based communication still exists among the Chinese intelligentsia even after Tiananmen Square. In fact this is the disruptive technology that will eventually weaken the corporation. The corporation’s last remaining monopoly power is created by the ineffi ciency of the labour market, which prevents individuals from seeking new jobs as easily as they do new cars. The Net is changing this rapidly, to the benefi t of the most talented individuals. As Charles Handy says, ‘the big challenge for the elephants is that they don’t end up as the home for the second rate’.

The corporation as we know it is now in trouble. There is nothing to prevent its demise given that what had previously been its advantages are becoming less and less important. In fact, its accumulation of power will come to be seen as a kind of historical aberration, like centrally planned economies. This is the big story for the next decade and it should already be capturing our attention. The technologies of communication and collaboration will drive economic power from the institution to the individual, and the deci-sions about how our resources fulfi l our desires will be revolutionized.

How?Roger Camrass and Martin Farncombe have done a courageous thing,

and the right one. They have broken the corporation into its constituent elements, identifi ed the forces that determine how these elements can and

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x F O R E W O R D

will be put back together, and predicted the combinations that will thrive over the next ten years.

Rather than picking this or that trend, declaring it universal and ex-trapolating it, they have created a chemistry of enterprise, allowing atomic engineers all over the economy to start making their own new compounds, testing them, and determining those that are the most promising. They have got the crucial drivers absolutely right: connectivity replacing many of the advantages of scale; fi nancial capital giving way to human and intellectual capital; the emergence of new types of entities. But, above all, they have signalled a critical change in perspective, from an economy of monolithic and self-contained institutions looking at life from the top down, to a net-work of atomic entities constantly forming new relationships and creating value from the bottom up.

In this their latest book, they lay out both the periodic table of ele-ments and rules for this chemistry, and describe some of the new things that can be fashioned with it. No doubt, many more things will be created than anyone can foresee. But the process is essential: deconstruct the ways that value is added in corporations today, examine the forces that will alter this picture, and analyse the components that will support value creation in the future.

This networked, bottom-up perspective parallels powerful currents in today’s economy (such as individual-based data mining and mass customization) as well as tomorrow’s, the focus being on value created at the molecular level through biotechnology, nanotechnology and advances in materials. The bottom-up view will prevail, and will up-end our views of resource management.

Corporate power and its pathological cousin, the infl uence of fi nancial analysts, will be eroded. As we fi nd new ways to organize around our desires, including how we want to work and manage our own professional lives, we will create the kind of economic chemistry that Camrass and Farncombe describe. In the process, an economy of the people, by the people, and for the people will reappear.

The corporation looks to be in full cry, with corporate executives not only highly paid but also lionized – Jack Welch got an $8 million book advance! But the bubble will burst as surely as it did for the dot-coms and,

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F O R E W O R D x i

if corporations are to extract value from the assets they have built, they must understand the source of the power of the insurgents and the forms the alternatives may take. This book is a guide to transforming the value locked within the corporation into a new form, adapted to the connected economy and able to continue adapting on its own. It illustrates a challenge that will face every corporate leader in the decade to come.

Endnotes

1 Clayton Christensen, 1997, The Innovator’s Dilemma, Harvard Business School Press, ISBN 0875845851.

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Preface

The fundamental message of this book is that you are about to become more important than you can possibly imagine.

In a few years from now, chances are that you will still be doing what you do today. You are, after all, presumably an expert in whatever your chosen career is. Whether you’re a lawyer or an accountant or a human resources manager, the odds are you will still be a lawyer, an accountant or a human resources manager in ten years’ time.

It is quite possible (even likely) that the way you do your job (the tools you use, the methodology you employ) will not have changed either. After all, accounting, for instance, is not a fi eld given to radical innovation or theoretical shake-ups!

You may even be doing this same work in the same way for the self-same employer.

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x i v P R E F A C E

Yet, in spite of all this, we predict that everything in your life (that’s right; and not just your professional life either) is about to change. Why?

Let’s put it this way: for the better part of the two centuries since the Industrial Revolution, the business world has been governed by the underlying notion that ‘the sum is greater than the parts’. This has led to a theory of the fi rm that says that power and infl uence will concentrate in an ever-smaller roster of bigger and exponentially more infl uential companies, super-companies that would do it all, for whom scale would be everything. Cogs would have an identity only as invisible parts of the machine.

Sea changes in the world of communications over the last half-dozen years (which, indeed, continue to take place as we write this book) are reshaping the world in which we live and work. In fact, they are revolutionizing it. The outcome of this fact is that the balance of power in the business world is shifting. In very short order, the theory of the fi rm is going to be turned on its head.

The parts are about to become greater than the sum.And you are one of the parts.In the new corporate world, every part will be seen to have value and identity

and, because each part can and will exist in its own independent orbit (connectivity being both the enabler and the inspiration behind this fact), each part will have a new relationship with the sum.

We are not saying that all parts in the new world will be equal, or that the value of some of these newly empowered or respected parts will fundamentally improve their economic lot. But we are saying that all the parts will be valued and recognized for what they are. There will be no more ‘cogs’ (a description that damns by faint praise) because there will be no more ‘machine’.

We call these parts ‘atoms’, and the seeds of the ‘atomic’ corporation are already growing. The huge, unwieldy companies of today are composed of atoms, just as companies in the future will be. But today, the atoms are aggregated in a complex corporate environment that serves to stifl e their effectiveness and ability to innovate.

In the future world, the world of the ‘Atomic Corporation’, the atoms are freed and in the process the corporation is redefi ned. Tomorrow’s atom, freed to achieve greater productivity, may be today’s individual employee, today’s small department within the company, or today’s contractor. In the future, the work itself won’t change … but the working relationships will.

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P R E F A C E x v

Furthermore, even though the parts are the important thing, the atoms of the future do form a whole. What is important here is that the value of the whole will amount to more than it does today. The atomic economy will function more effectively and more cost-effi ciently, and it will be more responsive to changes, precisely because the focus will be on the parts.

As mergers such as AOL-Time Warner have surely proved, we are reaching the point where increasing corporate size seems an end in itself, regardless of the consequences. Something has to give. It will. The atomic corporation will be the result.

And you will be the winner.You will be the winner because the atomic world will be one in which quality

overrides quantity, in which achievement is held in higher regard than paper-push-ing, and in which you are valued for what you can deliver and nothing else. Today, work contracts and employee handbooks mostly amount to pointless collections of rules and regulations few of which have any direct relationship to the quality of work output. In future, employee/employer relationships will be defi ned simply through deliverables. Lithe, responsive and expert atoms (whether individuals or small companies) will focus on productivity and productivity alone. ‘Punching the clock’ will, not before time, be consigned to history. Ironically, most of us will achieve more in our professional lives while simultaneously having more to give to our families.

This book is about the change, and the road on which we have already em-barked to the ‘Atomic World’.

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Acknowledgements

Background and research

Although the writing of this book was a compressed six-month project, it is the culmination of a thirty-year journey for the two authors. The jour-ney starts in 1974, which, according to the Intel Museum in Santa Clara, California, is the dawn of the digital age – at which time the world’s fi rst microprocessor was manufactured!

To present a comprehensive snapshot of today’s digital revolution and to be bold enough to describe some order within the ensuing chaos requires more than a mere point of view. It calls for credible research and experience that goes well beyond the combined authority of just two individuals. To that extent, this book has its origins partially in a moment of inspired vision, but also in an extensive research project.

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x v i i i A C K N O W L E D G E M E N T S

With regard to the latter – our research – the foundations of this book are varied and all equally critical. They include the outcome of various stud-ies that the authors have been involved with over a number of years with a variety of partners. They also include a study of the works of a number of our peers (such as the books/articles Blown to Bits; Unbundling the Corporation;and Break-up!) that have at once enriched and informed our own work and have thereby advanced our theory of the ‘Atomic Corporation’. Also, we are particularly indebted to several institutions and related individuals through which we have gained personal access to the knowledge and collective wis-dom that provides reliable commentary on today’s profound events.

We acknowledge in particular and with enormous gratitude the following people and organizations that have contributed the intellectual underpin-nings to this book.

The Center for Business Innovation in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and the associated work of its director Chris Meyer and his colleague Stan Davis have contributed much to our understanding of both the connected economy and the underlying fi nancial metrics that determine corporate success in this new era.

Two infl uential studies of the future have provided detailed research and evidence for our fi ndings:

• ‘Business in the Third Millennium’, undertaken from 1992–1998, brought together twelve global sponsors to navigate the new digital landscape. These included organizations such as Chevron, EPRI, GRI and the US Postal Service in the USA; BP, BT, Fujitsu/ICL and Barclays in the UK; The European Commission; NTT, DoCoMo and the Fujitsu Research Institute in Japan. The study was managed and supported by the Stanford Research Institute (SRI).

• ‘Management in the Nineties’, undertaken by the Massachusetts Insti-tute of Technology on behalf of twelve industrial sponsors, and the direct predecessor of ‘Business in the Third Millennium’. This programme led to the development of business re-engineering that was commercialized by consulting fi rms such as CSC Index and Gemini Consulting in the early 1990s. The authors acknowledge the particular work of colleagues such as James Champy, Michael Hammer and Fried Wiersema of CSC Index in the intellectual development of atomization.

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A C K N O W L E D G E M E N T S x i x

Prior to these two programmes, Roger Camrass was intimately involved in one of the world’s leading CIO programmes. The Butler Cox Foundation undertook extensive research on behalf of over 500 major corporations across Europe. Projects covering every aspect of information technology from database design and distributed processing to IS effi ciency and effectiveness were meticulously chartered through the 1980s and 1990s on behalf of the member organizations. The Foundation became one of Europe’s leading IT forums and is fondly remembered by its charter members.

Acknowledgements and thanks

We do not claim to be the fi rst or only exponents of atomization. Indeed, several other distinguished authors have described similar concepts over recent years. We stand on the shoulders of Chris Meyer and Stan Davis, authors of Blur. We also acknowledge the work of John Hagel III, author of Harvard Business Review article Unbundling the Corporation; Philip Evans and Thomas Wurster, authors of Blown to Bits; James Champy, author of Re-engineering the Corporation and David Sadtler, author of Break-up! and their respective co-authors.

In researching new topics for this volume, we interviewed specialists from leading consulting fi rms and public institutions. We would like to acknowl-edge the help of the following individuals: Ian Brinkley, Chief Economist of the Trades Union Congress; Andy Mulholland, Chief Technology Offi cer of Cap Gemini Ernst & Young; Angus Knowles-Cutler, Partner of Deloitte and Touche; Jason Rabinowitz, Director, McKinsey & Company; Jacky Ross, Vice-President of IBM Global Services; Charles Snodgrass, Managing Di-rector of Outsourcing Advisors Ltd; and David Sadtler, Fellow of Ashridge Strategic Management Centre.

We are also grateful for the help and encouragement of our original publisher, Mark Allin, for being an instant believer, and his successor, John Moseley. Our editors, Sancha Dunstan and Keith Brody, brought our words to life in this new edition.

And fi nally, we could not have produced this work without the active support of our wives and families. Thank you, Susi Camrass and Judy Farn-combe, and sorry about the missed vacations!

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1

The Countdown Begins

Delta revolution

Delta. That’s the word engineers use to describe change. Change in direc-tion, change in speed, change in volume.

But the volume of changes today is greater than at any time in recent history. We are facing huge, and huge numbers of, alterations in the geo-political world, in our social environments, in our personal lives. Face it, our world is changing, and it’s changing dramatically.

We all recognize that the world that we are used to is not, in its famil-iar form, going to be around for much longer. Most of us have yet to really grasp the nature and the true extent of the changes that we are about to experience, and that’s because we can only see a few pieces of the jigsaw – the picture is hidden from us.

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2 T H E C O U N T D O W N B E G I N S

Moore’s Law, for instance, is one piece of this jigsaw of delta. It estab-lishes the principle that the price/performance ratio of computer chips will roughly double every eighteen months. That’s a one thousandfold increase in power every ten years. Look at it another way: the $1000 laptop you use today is equivalent to the billion-dollar brain of thirty years ago.

Big deal. It still just does email, right? Wrong. Moore’s Law (and its bastard child, the Internet) doesn’t just mean faster word processing. It means the downfall of the corporation you work for.

Don’t believe us? The printing press nearly killed off one of the largest corporations in history – the Catholic Church. At the start of the sixteenth century, Martin Luther nailed his colours to his church door, fuelled by his revulsion at a money-raising scheme. This initiated a torrent of reform – the virtual atomization of the Church – not because of Luther’s zeal but because the printing press had made the Bible available to anyone who could read. The power of the priests had been broken (more on this in Chapter 13).

In today’s world, the corporation and not the Church is the institution at the centre of most of our lives. And the corporate world is now embarking on a reformation of its own. Just like poor Pope Leo X back in 1517, today’s CEOs have little real grasp of the magnitude of the threat they face and the extent of the changes to come.

This corporate reformation – like all radical changes – is not 100% predictable, but we can offer you a chance to adapt to the future before it buries you. This reformation also has a name: atomization.

Our fi rst book, The Atomic Corporation, was published during the fi rst week of September 2001. The horror of the Twin Towers changed our outlook to an even greater extent than we could have ever predicted. Even apart from its geopolitical consequences – increasingly nasty and still unclear – we have seen a crisis of trust along with some of the largest bankruptcies in history. Enron (one of our previous case studies), Arthur Andersen, WorldCom, Marconi and a whole fl eet of airlines have all hit the wall.

Since then, we’ve taken our message to leading corporations and opinion formers all over the world – from BP, Henkel and Prudential in Europe to Coca-Cola, AT&T and American Express in the USA. We have experienced events fi rst-hand that have shaken global confi dence and chal-lenged established wisdom. We are more convinced than ever that bloated

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T H E C O U N T D O W N B E G I N S 3

and unresponsive corporate structures must be taken apart and rebuilt, and that our new atomic framework is the most plausible and compelling future scenario.

This new book is not about theory, atomic or otherwise. Our fi rst book was amply equipped in that department (although we do cover the main points once again in Chapter 4). This book is about outcomes. It’s time to look at the possible consequences for us as individuals and for the corporate and social structures we work in. And it’s time to ask what we have to do when the plane lands (see Chapter 13).

First, let’s talk consequences. We will start this chapter by laying out some predictions on what we think might happen in the next twelve weeks, twelve months and twelve years.1 By the end of this book we hope you can anticipate the many changes that will affect your personal and working lives, and that you will be helping to make our predictions come true.

Don’t fear the future. Be a part of it. After all, it’s not like you have a choice.

The next twelve weeks

• Through a chance encounter on the World Wide Web you connect with someone you have not heard of or spoken to in twenty years. Despite the passage of time a new level of intimacy emerges between you both, and exciting business possibilities evolve.

• Your son declines a graduate job offer with IBM in preference to a year of world travel. The staff at IBM are not surprised – despite the depressed employment market, even the best corporations fi nd it diffi cult to recruit the best graduates.

• Your father realizes that falls in the stock market means that retirement in his fi fties is no longer an option. Instead, he invests all his surplus funds in bricks and mortar, bypassing traditional savings channels.

• An old friend’s business unit is demerged from its parent company. He feels energized by the smaller management team and closer contact with customers and suppliers, and clocks up an eighty-hour week for the fi rst time in his life.

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4 T H E C O U N T D O W N B E G I N S

• A leading pharmaceuticals giant announces that it intends to withdraw entirely from R&D activities, currently exceeding $2 billion of invest-ment a year. Its CEO stresses the need to focus on global marketing and sales in its drive to retain its number one position in the sector. It announces alliances with over eighty biotech and drug discovery com-panies to fi ll the R&D gap.

• General Electric (GE) opens up its own stock market to trade over one hundred separately quoted companies within its own corporate portfolio. Investors, both institutions and individuals, are encouraged to swap their GE shares for a portfolio of GE securities ranging from power and lighting to fi nance and professional services.

• AOL-Time Warner, one of the largest mergers in history, throws in the towel and announces its intention to break apart into fi ve separate companies. This ends what many regard as the largest destruction of shareholder value in modern times.

The next twelve months

• You are told that, due to the continuing harsh economic climate, your services to a Global 2000 fi rm are no longer required. You receive a hand-some pay-off and the promise of part-time work that never transpires. After a few weeks of personal doubt and uncertainty, you fall into a new and more enjoyable pattern of portfolio employment by deciding what your real competencies are and applying them to the marketplace.

• Ford sells off its premium brand car companies, including Aston Martin, Jaguar, Range Rover and Volvo to the French fashion and perfumes company LVMH. In an unprecedented bid to return to its core business, it continues to provide manufacturing and logistics services to LVMH, encouraging the new owner to concentrate on brand extensions and product innovation.

• HP completes the world’s largest outsourcing deal with a Taiwan in-dustrial consortium. It transfers all manufacturing and supply chain tasks to its Eastern partner in return for a 25% share of the new global manufacturing platform and a sign-on bonus of $5 billion cash to cover

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T H E C O U N T D O W N B E G I N S 5

the asset value. Its workforce is reduced from 140,000 to less than 40,000 worldwide.

• Affected by the downturn in merger and acquisition (M&A) activity, Goldman Sachs decides to spin off all activities in this area and forms a joint venture with leading accountants Deloitte & Touche. The new entity takes equity positions in each of its M&A activities and draws on capital funds from a variety of investment banks.

• Nedcor, a relatively unknown South African bank, bids for and wins the outsourcing of Lloyds TSB’s core transaction processing platform, effectively gutting its retail operations. The deal takes the form of a new global vehicle based in South Africa’s low-wage economy that is soon touting for similar business from the leading retail banks in Europe and the USA.

• After almost fi fteen years of relocation planning and deliberation, HSBC decides to abandon its new thirty-storey building in Canary Wharf in favour of smaller offi ces co-located with its business interests. As well as creating better connections to customers, this avoids the vulnerability of thousands of workers concentrated in one building.

• Shell makes an unprecedented announcement – it intends to spin off its global retail operations and to concentrate on oil exploration and production. McDonald’s registers interest in acquiring more than 30,000 fi lling stations – expanding its own footprint by a factor of two.

• Private equity house KKR is launched on to the New York stock ex-change and becomes the second most valued stock after Microsoft. Its principals each become wealthier than Bill Gates and Larry Ellison put together.

And the next twelve years?

• The average employment contract for staff working in California will come down from its current duration of eighteen months to less than thirty days – or one working month. The concept of permanent employ-ment will be consigned to the annals of history.

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6 T H E C O U N T D O W N B E G I N S

• Upwardly mobile professionals appoint personal agents to manage their careers. In return, agents take a share of annual wages and stock options as their fee. Other service companies step in to take charge of domestic obligations such as house cleaning, fi nancial administration and holiday planning.

• The fi rst trillionaire is crowned. He has amassed his fortune in just under ten years as a result of applying intelligent agent technology to web-based search engines – his corporation fi nds what you need on the Internet. A PhD from Stanford University in 2003, he had no im-mediate expectations of making money from his research thesis. He is rapidly overtaken by the main investor of a biotech company that is the fi rst to gain approval for a drug that arrests ageing. Neither of these corporations employs more than fi fty people.

• Will Smith, fi lm star and singer, becomes the fi rst black president of the United States, where public appeal and charisma are recognized as the essential differentiating qualities of a successful politician. In the UK the Conservative Party, bereft of personalities, slips into quiet obscurity.

• Educationalists abandon fact-based learning in favour of discovery and experience. Virtual reality becomes as commonplace as personal com-puters in classrooms all over the USA and Europe.

• The most eminent consultancy fi rm in the world (you know who we mean) closes after the partners refuse to provide any more working capital to keep the fi rm alive. The only saleable asset will be the research institute that generates more than suffi cient equity funds to fi nance all existing partner pensions.

• A global account team working for IBM undertakes a leveraged buy-out, raising over $1 billion to purchase its profi table current customer relationship. This team consists of no more than twenty staff and exploits its new asset by forming multiple relationships with IT, HR and fi nance service providers.

• Device-to-device traffi c exceeds for the fi rst time all other traffi c across the World Wide Web. Much of our personal communication is delegated to software agents embedded in our hand-held terminals, laptops, clothes and other intelligent devices.

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