What Business Would You Start?

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Name: Watts Wacker
Age: 48
Location: Westport, Conn.
Background: Futurist and author, including coauthor of The 500-Year Delta; CEO of think tank FirstMatter LLC; former resident futurist at SRI International, in Menlo Park, Calif.

"The information society is completed -- it's actually been around about 90 years. Now we're beginning the post-information society. In Alvin Toffler's terms, any time one of these new 'waves' comes in, like when the agricultural economy started giving way to the industrial economy, you have an 'epoch of uncertainty.' Now we're at a point where the uncertainty may never stabilize -- there is such a cascading of the amount of change with the rate of change. It isn't just about the acceleration of the pace of change. It's also the amount of it. The only certainty we can count on in the future will be a continuing state of uncertainty.

"First let me give you some of the building blocks. Every epoch has its organizing premise. When we were industrial, it was reason; when we were information, it was complexity, chaos theory, choice modeling -- you know, the learning how to manage, thriving through chaos, if you will.

"Now we think the new organizing premise is paradox. And so when you're starting a new business of any description, you have to be prepared at the same time for it to be the exact opposite.

"Case in point: the Ford Motor Co. At one end of the spectrum, Ford could become a $500-billion business with 85 employees. That would be one approach to its future. At the other end, it could give every one of its current employees a laptop, which it started to do. The company could then build a vertical portal, which means every employee would go through Ford to go into the ether, and it could make a deal with all of the best-of-class retailers for a meter click on anything the employees buy. You buy anything, I get paid money. It's called click-through revenue. Well, when you have well over 100,000 U.S. employees delivering click-through revenue to you -- you could actually do nothing that would make you more money than that.

"So bringing it back to the question, What kind of business would I start? Whatever it is, I would recognize that whatever approach I'm using, the exact opposite may be just as opportunistic.

"So paradox becomes the organizing premise of the post-information society, just as complexity was the organizing premise of the information society. The key to paradox is that you don't do one or the other of those approaches; you do both. You start your business, and whatever direction you pursue, you think about opportunities in the opposite direction at the same time."

Name: Manny Fernandez
Age: 55
Location: Fort Myers, Fla.
Background: Cofounder and managing director of SI Ventures, a venture-capital firm specializing in information-technology and communications infrastructure companies; and chairman emeritus and former president and CEO of Gartner, an IT information and advice firm.

"I think that the reality of the world today is that we are in many ways going back to the future. What created great businesses in the 1980s is really what's going to create great businesses in the 21st century. In the 1980s the world was pretty much driven by new technology breakthroughs and technology implementations. And as we moved into the '90s we became very much driven by marketing and hype. I think the next few years, through the horizon year of 2006, are once again going to be driven by tech breakthroughs and the implementation of technologies.

"A lot of the technologies are going to come out of universities, research labs, and major technology centers and companies that exist today. It's just not going to be from a one-laptop person on a mountaintop anymore."

Name: Patricia M. Cloherty
Age: 59
Location: New York City
Background: Former general partner and cochair of Patricof & Co. Ventures Inc., a large international private-equity investment firm; current chair of the $440-million U.S.-Russia Investment Fund/Delta Capital Management

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