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I’ve never been the sort of person to sit and stare at something I’ve made for a long time after making it. I like to move on. If you had asked me right after I “finished” writing Ferus Rex whether it was going to be the only novel I ever wrote, I would have said “No way!” Ten years later, it looks very likely to be the only one. But ten years ago, I tried to plunge right into novel #2 like my life depended on it. I conceived to write a novel that would cure the queasy feeling of self-indulgence engendered by the writing of Ferus Rex. How that directive led me to the plot of Powerless Day, is anybody’s guess.

The year is the not-so-distant-yet-very-different future, I learned to write about thanks to William Gibson. Neuromancer foresaw accurately some things that were coming because of the Internet. When writers want things to change very dramatically in a relatively short period of time, they will sometimes interpose an apocalypse of some sort, between the present and the day-after-tomorrow they want to describe. How you actually got from A to B is relegated to the oblivion of prologue. While the words scroll upwards on the screen and the John Williams score manipulates us into the feeling that something significant is being explained, a writer has merely to declare the way things are. What continuity, if any, there might be between present and prospective future is for the reader to think about on his way home from the multiplex.

In the case of Powerless Day, all you really need to know is that America is in an undeniable decline. Things are bad at home. They are bad in a number of “trouble spots” around the world. Unemployment is exorbitant. So is crime. In many ways, American society has been flipped upside down. The white poor outnumber minority poor. The urban landscape in most major cities is dominated by a small number of organizations with a mixture of racial, ideological and political origins. In the heartland, the hillbillies are arming and entrenching. But in Los Angeles, local government, organized crime and street gangs are engaged in outrageously candid warfare on the city streets. In New York, it is the same. In all the country, there is a high hysteria in the air. The experiences of rape and riot and violence are common in most places. Half the populace is checked out on drugs. The other half is having an orgy while Rome burns all around them. (more…)

Technology and the Organization
EVOLVING TOWARD SIMPLICITY

Originally published in the Journal of American MENSA, February, 1996

Prophets and pundits have confidently said it of every new communications advance — the telephone, radio, TV, fax, cell phone and Internet browser. “It will change human experience as we know it.” In 1948 a literary forecaster, British novelist George Orwell, predicted that governments would use new surveillance and propaganda technologies to enslave citizens. Fortunately, he was wrong.

Actually, Orwell got it backward. Digital technology is not imposing oppressive bureaucracy but restoring a bygone social order — a simpler one. Far from shackling individuals, computers are liberating us. Ultimately, every aspect of our lives will be simplified to the same degree that we permit ourselves to become Wired. The sooner we embrace the idea of the individual as a node on the network, the freer we’ll be to exploit the possibilities of universal connectedness. Perhaps the first great change to our daily lives is visible in the ways we work.

Rather than create or reinforce structure in the workplace, the communications revolution is helping to tear it down. In general terms, large, rigidly hierarchical organizations will be the victims of the digital world, not its masters. Nowhere is this more clear than in the former Soviet Union. Although it may still be possible to meet an ordinary someone on the streets of Moscow whose views of America are hopelessly warped by propaganda, today the Orwellian Pravda is quite dead. Gone is the central fountain from which the populace sipped its ideology.

Orwell’s vision was cloudy, but what can we see ahead to the future of oranizations? That the middleman, the go-between, will become extinct. The intermediary is doomed: technology strips him of effectiveness. This flattening of the vertical order, the sawing of corporate ladders into step stools, is already clear to the unfortunate casualties of down-sizing. But its liberating potential (both to the corporation and the individual) is still not widely grasped.

Every sick Granny is a wolf.

In business, it’s tempting to take negative experiences and turn them into sweeping generalities about the future. Being bitten by a competitor or having shot yourself in the foot is easier to bear if you can turn the experience into wisdom. But every lesson has its context, and there’s a limit to the clarity of hindsight. Andersen Consulting has worked with hundreds of the world’s leading companies. We’ve acquired a wealth of knowledge in strategy, technology, process and people management, all of which will help us to understand your organization’s mistakes and its successes. So, any direction we provide will always consider the past, but won’t worship it. Because sometimes things really do stay the same, but sometimes they don’t.

ANDERSEN

CONSULTING