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July 9, 2001—Decidedly
Undecided
Mixed Signals. Fuel prices have fallen so much that
some have opined that California's energy crisis is over . We sure like
buying regular for $1.32, even though that is tough when you remember the
glorious days of $.32 in days of yore. What with the Fed interest rate
cut--and another half point to come shortly--we have a little liquidity
splashing around the system. And the numbers in non-manufacturing are
bumping up a bit. But tearful earnings reports abound, employers are now
into their second round of job cuts, and the stock market is going nowhere.
Indecision. We cannot get the engine of growth started again because
nobody can decide it's time to get going. Despite all the cash in their
piggy banks, the venture capitalists are sitting on the sidelines. In our
Annual Report on Annual Reports 2001, we found that new CEO's were being
thrust to the front lines at a prodigious rate, but neither they nor their
boards had a real clue as to what to do next. This comes on the heels of a
decade where projects and capital expenditures were discussed to death,
leading to half-decisions about the wrong things much too late. The
difference now is that nothing is getting approved, and things are grinding
to a halt. Currently, decisiveness consists of shutting something down, not
getting something started.
Decisively Indecisive. For a while, it seems, we all must bet that
things could go either way--up or down. This may not lead to much of a
strategy, but we just seem to be at one of those moments where you figure
out how to waffle, whether investing in the stock market or figuring out
your inventory position for the next sales cycle. We have currently bet both
ways in the stock market, so we are making more than a nickel. The
money-makers at the moment are managing risk well, not seizing
opportunities.
Stunned by DW3. We keep discovering more and more terrific websites
put together by academics. A Duke librarian has created an absolutely
magnificent resource on classical music, DW3, which you can find on the
Global Province this week. All this proves that academics and scientists,
who more or less created the Web, still understand best what it is all
about. Even profound businessmen don't quite get it: the sophisticated
Jeffrey Skilling, head of the nation's energy broker, Enron, thinks of it as
a different kind of telephone system. But it is a collaborative-knowledge
tool where everybody owns a piece of the rock. Is not this lack of
understanding one of the reasons for our present impasse--this period of
indecision? We are now being presented with technologies whose applications
we do not understand. So we try to use them to replicate or automate
yesterday's tactics, instead of facing their implications and linking them
to brand new strategies and operating styles.
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