Need for speed

Entrepreneur, Dec, 1998 by Scott S. Smith

How do you get ahead in a world that's speeding up? Two fast-lane visionaries put entrepreneurs in the driver's seat in a fully connected economy.

If you think your business day is already hectic, fasten your seat belt - it's about to speed up considerably. That's the contention of Ernst & Young LLP's visionary business gurus Chris Meyer and Stan Davis, who have outlined how entrepreneurs can cope in Blur: The Speed of Change in the Connected Economy (Addison Wesley).

According to the duo, the driving force behind this acceleration is the Internet, which has already changed the speed at which business is conducted. This new faster economy will put an even greater premium on companies' intangible assets, such as intellectual capital, brand loyalty and employee relationships. Meyer and Davis' often radical insights have been described as "a decoder ring ... to make sense of the turbulence in the world of work today."

As director of the Ernst & Young Center for Business Innovation in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Meyer researches emerging business issues and is an authority on the evolution of the information economy.

Davis is an independent writer, speaker and senior research fellow at the Ernst & Young Center for Business Innovation. He's also a consultant for leading companies worldwide and the author of 2020 Vision (Addison Wesley) and the bestselling Future Perfect (Simon & Schuster), the recipient of Tom Peters' "Book of the Decade" award.

We asked Meyer and Davis to share their secrets on how to avoid perishing in this brave new world and how to prosper from the accelerated pace of business.

Entrepreneur: How do entrepreneurs fit into the blur economy?

Stan Davis: Entrepreneurs are the wave of the future because power is migrating to organizations where the employee and customer are in touch with each other. The computer infrastructure enables this. You need small, adaptive companies to respond quickly, and those are most often entrepreneurial businesses.

Large organizations are simultaneously downsizing and outsourcing, and the real job growth is coming from entrepreneurs filling these needs. This allows someone in a home office with a couple of employees to operate in a global economy. Large companies have to learn how to act small and large at the same time, while small companies can now act as if they're large. Over the Net, you don't necessarily know if a company is small or large, just how well it provides a product or service.

Entrepreneur: Your book describes a world that promises to be much more dependent on computers. With all the computer hardware, software, Internet connection and service problems many businesses already experience, won't this vision get bogged down by the daily realities of technology?

Davis: If you consider how far we've come in becoming interconnected even with all these problems, imagine what will happen when these things get debugged. There will be a quantum leap in the speed of doing business.

Entrepreneur: Won't the increasing speed only exacerbate the standard problems of doing business?

Davis: Any change of the magnitude we're talking about will have advantages and disadvantages. Our ability to get supplies overnight and letters instantaneously now has a bright side as much as it has a dark side.

Entrepreneur: Overworked entrepreneurs might find it alarming that you foresee business survival as being dependent on companies being able to deliver 24-hour service, seven days a week, with home and work life blurring together. Don't people need downtime?

Chris Meyer: Technologies like e-mail and voice mail have raised expectations about availability. For a customer, the next best thing to [talking to someone] is to be able to leave a message. And better than a message machine is the ability to leave a message and have a software program [respond] that the message was received and that you will get back to them within a certain time frame.

Entrepreneur: We're already overloaded with information. How can we cope with an increase?

Meyer: There has always been too much information flowing in, but recently the offense has had more of an edge. More than anyone else, entrepreneurs have to be concerned about how this affects them, because time is their most precious resource. They need to use the techniques that are available, such as e-mail filters and caller ID, to filter out time-wasters.

There will also be more entrepreneurial opportunities as managing attention becomes critical. Imagine a whole set of mechanisms and players that will appear to help us invest our attention optimally and provide reports on the return we've gained. There will be a shift from managing transactions to managing relationships.

Ways for sellers to get around the information overload are also emerging, such as permission marketing, in which information is sent only to individuals who indicate they want it.

Entrepreneur: You argue that the old theories of economics are dead. If that's true, how does that affect the creation of a business plan?