At a FORTUNE dinner, business leaders and academics discussed how technology—especially wireless communication—is changing the world.
Dec 09 2005
By David Kirkpatrick
Fortune.com
What was the only weapon that struck back at the terrorists on 9/11? Self-organized civilians, armed with cellphones.
"A bunch of people on Flight 93 were scared out of their minds," said Stewart Brand at a recent FORTUNE dinner in San Francisco. "so they formed a spontaneous network and figured out what was going on using their cellphones. Then they did something about it." Empowered with the knowledge that terrorists had crashed other planes into the World Trade Center, they fought back. Presumably that's what led Flight 93 to crash in Pennsylvania rather than hit the White House or Capitol. Meanwhile, the massed forces of the U.S. military were essentially helpless.
Brand, the near-legendary figure who founded the Whole Earth Catalog back in the 1960s, set the tone for the dinner early. FORTUNE gathered about 20 smart people from business and beyond to answer one utterly elemental question: What's new? The aim was to help determine what subjects to feature at next summer's Brainstorm 2006 conference, which FORTUNE will host along with the Aspen Institute.
Here's what this crew thinks is new: Power is flowing toward the individual thanks to technology. And these empowered individuals are changing just about every aspect of society with information acquired online. Jonathan Schwartz, Sun's president, spoke of the "fundamental disruptions that are occurring because we are all connected to one another. The terrorist attacks in London were not covered by the media," he noted, "but by the people in the tube. The people became the media." Many used their camera-equipped cell phones to shoot and distribute images of the damage. Schwartz went on to note that "there's a radical shift underway in who is responsible for creating knowledge and information."
The dinner's discussion frequently touched upon one technology that is critical to how the world is changing and getting connected—cellphones "The world absolutely, totally, underestimates the importance of the cellphone," said Richard Newton, dean of the School of Engineering at the University of California at Berkeley. According to many of our dinner guests, the cellphone is the perfect recipient of online data, especially as it evolves into a $20 videophone and TV. There's no information that you get on your PC that you won't soon be able to get on your phone. The information that will flow to peoples' phones in real time—about prices, markets, risks, and what other people are doing—may alter government, media, entertainment, corporate structure, and how and with whom we conduct business transactions. It will even, several said, contribute mightily to reducing the economic divide that is still the world's greatest blight—by giving the poor inexpensive access to information.
But Gary Hamel, the author and consultant, got impatient with all this optimism. He says there's a dark side that emerges from connectedness and all the new information available to people: "In 1750 the per capita income gap between the richest and the poorest country was 3 to 1. Today it's 200 to 1. So we can sit and talk about connectivity, and yet people in poverty are just connected enough to know how bad they have it, out of which comes a tide of resentment and anger."
The conversation also turned to all the new ways that people are organizing themselves using online tools, and how that may change institutions. Diana Farrell, who heads the McKinsey Global Institute, suggested that "the next organizing units won't be governments or organizations as we know them." Hamel, among others, pointed to Wikipedia.org, the collectively-produced, open-source encyclopedia I mentioned in this column last week, "Fed Up With E-Mail? Try a Wiki," and said "we're seeing a fundamental shift in how we think about aggregating human effort." He continued: "Big companies are going to be the last to get this…How do you change the DNA of large organizations?" To which Michael Patsalos-Fox, who heads McKinsey's operations in North America, replied: "Maybe that's just an impossibility…Maybe the corporation as we know it will actually break down into networked units of some sort."
Michael Marks, CEO of Flextronics, found himself exasperated by that scenario, and jumped to defend big companies. He announced that Flextronics employs 125,000 employees in 30 countries, and is having no trouble hiring or managing them. "You cannot believe how many people in the world want to be part of a big company." Ironically, Flextronics happens to be among the world's largest cellphone manufacturers.
The two-hour conversation ranged far more widely than can be reported here. While there was some consensus on the big trends, such as connectedness, there was little certainty about where they're taking us. Hamel may have summarized it best. "Change has kind of gone hypercritical," he said, "yet we have no idea what it means for society, how it's going to change human relationships, or government, or big organizations." A bit scary perhaps, but it's all plenty of fodder for what will likely be an amazing Brainstorm conference next year.
No comments:
Post a Comment