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As cultures mutate at the click of the mouse, Danny Hillis sits in Disneyland and takes a long, some say crazy, diversion from the high-wired pulls of the Techno Age. The MIT futurist guru who pioneered the concept of parallel computers that led to today’s supercomputers is now bringing his genius to bear on a mechanical (yes), hand-cranked (yes), clock that will stand the test of time. Right up to 12,000 years. Staggered? There is more. Walt Disney is paying Hillis’s salary and providing a support team although the Long Now Foundation is underwriting the Millennium Clock. In return, Disney gets the nod to make a replica of the clock once it is done. For Hillis has no doubts – Forster may have said “Connect”, Danny Hillis’ mantra is “Endure”.
While Hillis was adopting an elliptical back-to-the-future strategy in search of permanence, Internet savant Douglas Engelbart was holding forth at a managers’ seminar in Menlo Park recently. “In 25 years, knowledge will double every three months,” he proclaimed to the participants from Cisco Systems and Sun Microsystems. “What will that do for learning requirements?” Hold up that question as a mirror to present-day work-place and John Rifkin’s provocative book title “The End of Work” seems uncomfortably prescient.
 Look at some of the jobs that are being doused out by the fibre-optic hose. Blue collar workers, secretaries, receptionists, clerical workers, sales clerks, bank tellers, telephone operators, librarians, wholesalers and middle managers are rapidly being given a one-way push towards the exit. According to one statistic that Rifkin came up with, 90 million of 124 million American jobs, were "potentially vulnerable to replacement by machines." Another telling statistic was how ATMs in American banks had replaced 37 percent of their workforce between 1983 and 1987, just around 179,000 employees. The list is growing, so rapidly that techno-power appears to take on the stranglehold of a Faustian bargain.
Not quite. For the Information Age carries with it a shopping list for new skills. At the same time, mutating cultures replaced traditional job markets with newer ones such as bioengineering, data warehousing, business-process re-engineering, web designers, internet content providers and so on. From the clickety-clack perch of the `knowledge worker’, it is a mine loaded with opportunity: Jobs are popping up faster than they could be filled. Simultaneously, industries are faced with acute people shortage and employee survival rides on ingenuity. If benevolent contract was being tossed out by the employer the employee was nose-thumbing organisational loyalty.
Over the past decade and across the hierarchical mesh, corporate India too was coming to terms with the disappearance of permanence. In a boom-bust-upswing cycle that had left fat-money earners pale after a `golden handshake’, they were now getting attuned to the seek-and-ye-shall-find work culture. So what, if sometimes these proved only to be bargain sales. Employers were getting wiped out thanks to the sharpening polarisation between the glut and shortage of `qualified' people. Darwin’s theory demanded corporate cannibalisation. And the canny executive has begun to scoop out concealed opportunities. Was versatility the key or specialisation? Should you go to office or to a venture capitalist? Or back to school? How about bringing work home and staying there to push up take-home? Or jettison security for the world wide visiting card? Welcome to the world of the born-again exec.
Continued... (page 2)
NANDITA MUKUL
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Peeping
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Jhelo this stuff! 