THE ACCELERATIVE ECONOMY
This corporate identity crisis is intensified by the speed at which events are moving. For the very speed of change introduces a new element into management, forcing executives, already nervous in an unfamiliar environment, to make more and more decisions at a faster and faster pace. Response times are honed to a minimum.
At the financial level the speed of transactions is accelerating as banks and other financial institutions computerize. Some banks even relocate geographically to take advantage of time zone differences. Says Euromoney, the international bankers’ journal, “Time zones can be used as a competitive edge.”
In this hotted-up environment, the big corporations are driven almost willy-nilly to invest and borrow in various currencies not on an annual, a ninety-day, or even a seven-day basis, but literally on an overnight or minute-to-minute basis. A new corporate officer has appeared in the executive suite—the “international cash manager,” who remains plugged into the worldwide electronic casino twenty-four hours a day, searching for the lowest interest rates, the best currency bargains, the fastest turnaround.*
In marketing, a similar acceleration is evident. “Marketers must respond quickly in order to insure survival for tomorrow,” declares Advertising Age, reporting that “Network TV programmers … are accelerating their decisions on killing new TV series that show rating weaknesses. No more waiting six or seven weeks, or a season. . . Another example: Johnson & Johnson learns that Bristol-Myers is determined to undersell J&J’s Tylenol… Does J&J adopt a wait-and-see attitude? No. In an amazingly short time, it moves to cut Tylenol’s prices in the stores. No more weeks or months for procrastination.” The very prose is breathless.
In engineering, in manufacture, in research, in sales, in training, in personnel, in every department and branch of the corporation the same quickening of decision-making can be detected.
And once more we see a parallel process, though less advanced, in the socialist industrial nations. COMF.CON. which used to revise its prices every five years when it issued its five-year plan, has been forced to revise its prices annually in an attempt to keep up with the faster pace. Before long it will be six months, then even less.
The results of this generalized speedup of the corporate metabolism are multiple: shorter product life-cycles, more leasing and renting, more frequent buying and selline, more ephemeral consumption patterns, more fads, more training time for workers (who must continually adjust to new procedures), more frequent changes in contracts, more negotiations and legal work, more pricing changes, more job turnover, more dependence on data, more ad hoc organization—all of it exacerbated by inflation.
The result is a high-stakes, high-adrenaline business environment. Under these escalating pressures it is easy to see why so many businessmen, bankers, and corporate executives wonder what exactly they are doing and why. Brought up with Second Wave certainties, they see the world they knew tearing apart under the impact of an accelerating wave of change.
* Nor is this function trivial. Like farmers who make more from selling land than from growing food, some major corporations are making more profit—or racking up greater losses—from currency and financial manipulation than from actual production.
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