SPAN: March/April 2000

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MarchiApril2000

SPAN Five and a Half Utopias Publisher Francis B. Ward

By Steven Weinberg

Tallis Beautiful

Editor-in-Chief Kiki S. Munshi

By Dinesh C. Sharma

Editor Lea Terhunc

President'sVisit

Associate Editor Arun Bhanot

An Interview with Ambassador Richard F. Celeste

Copy Editor A. Venkata Narayana

Tigers: Will They Last?

By Lea Terhune

Editorial Assistant K. Muthukumar

Aid for the Tiger

By A. VenkataNarayana

Art Director Suhas Nimbalkar Deputy Art Director Hemanr Bhamagar

Great Plains

Production(CitUJ.1arionManager Rakesh Agrawal

By Peter Brown

Research Services AIRC Documentation Services, American Information Resource Center

By Arun Bhanot

For Art's Sake

Front cover: The entry of U.S. carmakers like Ford and GM has revitalized the indigenous auto market. Today models like this Ford Ikon GT, designed in collaboration with Indian car customizer Dilip Chhabria, are becoming a common sight on Indian roads. See story on page 48. Photograph by Hemant Bhatnagar.

A Question of Definitions

By Peter Nagy

The Visionary Thing

By Bob Metcalfe

In Search of Innovation

Note: SPAN does not accept unsolicited manuscripts and materials and does not assume responsibility for them. Query letters are accepted.

By Robert Buderi

Four Pillars of Innovation

By Michael Dertouzos

STATEMENT FORM IV The following is a statemelll of ownership and other particulars about SPAN magazine as required under Section 19D(b) of the Press & Registration of Books Act, 1867. and under Rule 8 of the Registration of Newspaper (Central) Rules, 1956.

George Washington at Mount Vernon

Public Affairs Section American Embassy American Center

By Garry Wills

24. Kasturba Gandhi Marg 2. Periodicity of Publication 3. Printer's Name

ew Delhi 110001 Bimonthly Aroon Purie

Reinventing the Wheel

Nationality

indian

Address

Thomson Press (India) Limited.

18/35, Delhi Mathura Road Faridabad, Haryana 121007

By Sue Zesiger

Francis B. Ward American

Wooing the Indian Market: The Boys from Detroit Gear Up

4. Publisher's Name Nationality Address 5. Editor's Name Nationality Address 6. Names and addresses of individuals who own the newspaper and partners or shareholders holding more than one percent of the total capital

24, Kasturba Gandhi Marg New Delhi 110001 Lea Terhune American 24. Kasturba Gandhi Marg New Delhi It 000 1 The Governmem of the United States of America

T, Francis B. Ward, hereby declare that the particulars above are true to the best of my knowledge and belief.

(Signed)

Date: February 18, 2000

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I

By Murad Ali Baig

Transnational Law and Economic GrowthTwo Expert Opinions given

Interviews with Russell Pittman and Thomas Heller

Francis B. Ward

Signature of Publisher

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A LETTER

T

FROM

THE PUBLISHER

Dinesh C. Sharma, takes us back to the

he first spring of the new millennium

city again to look at skyscrapers, particu-

brings new activity, new life and the

added excitement

larly

of the first visit of a

the

phenomenal

Empire

President of the United States to India in

Building, which set construction

two decades. SPAN glimpses what this visit

not matched since.

might mean to both countries in an interview with

When Washington,

nc., was no more

State records

than a stretch

of land along the Potomac River, George Washington

Ambassador Richard F. C~leste.

Surely the growing interaction between the Indian

took care of business matters from his comfortable

and the American economies will be a topic of the

and beloved home Mount Vernon, 25 kilometers from

presidential visit. One excellent Indian product the

today's U.S. capital. "George Washington at Mount

President will see first thing upon disembarking is the

Vernon," by Garry Wills takes us inside the famous

automobile. While the automotive industry has not

mansion,

been something SPAN has dwelt on much in the past,

reassembled for a special exhibition commemorating

times have changed. Our cover story is about the leaps

the year of the first U.S. President's death, 1799.

made in that industry in India and research and devel-

where

many

In "Transnational

original

furnishings

Law and Economic

were

Growth,"

opment going on abroad. In "Wooing the Indian

legal experts Russell Pittman and Thomas Heller give

Market: The Boys from Detroit Gear Up," industry

opinions on new trends in international law. Both say

commentator Murad Ali Baig looks at the changes in

competition law is having an impact on the way com-

the Indian automobile market and how American auto

panies do business around the world. International

manufaCturers are getting in on the action. Then Sue

regulations that guarantee transparency and account-

Zesiger, in "Reinventing

ability may hold sway over local laws as more busi-

environment-friendly

the Wheel,"

surveys the

cars of the future-which

are

already on the bus routes of some cities today and may Following along these lines are "In Search of Innovation," "innovation

by Robert Buderi and "Four Pillars of

by Michael Dertouzos. is a tough

The concept of utopia has absorbed the thoughts of many great minds during past and previous millen-

soon be parked in many of our driveways.

Innovation,"

nesses strive to compete in international markets.

Buderi

says

nut to crack because

it

nia. In an update, Steven Weinberg reviews some of these and posits some others in "Five and a Half Utopias"-ranging

from the "free-market utopia," the

"green utopia," the "technological utopia" and more.

involves much more than invention," and he tells us

Arun Bhanot covers the art beat in his profile of

about the people who are trying to quantify this elu-

Peter Nagy, American artist, curator and India afi-

sive process. Tech guru Dertouzos

cionado who has been mounting exhibitions in his

that is behind

says it's passion

successful entrepreneurship,

rather

floating gallery Nature Morte for more than three

than the desire for money. And idea man Bob

years. Finally, and seriously, Lea Terhune

Metcalfe writes of the hard realities of being a cyber

Venkata Narayana consider the fate of one of the

proto-prophet

most beautiful-and

in "The Visionary Thing."

A pleasant break takes us to the "Great Plains," the subject of a photo

essay by Peter Brown. Brown

endangered-animals

and A. alive in

"Tigers: Will They Last?"

We hope you enjoy this issue of SPAN.

enthuses in word and picture about an expanse of America that most people merely speed past on coast -to-coast

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runs. And

"Tall Is Beautiful,"

by

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Five and a Half

Utopias Despite its dismal record, the idea of utopia continues to tug at the human heart. An eminent physicist examines the utopias that might await us in the years ahead. used to read a good deal of science fiction when I was a boy.

Even though I knew pretty early that I was going to be a scientist, it wasn't the science that interested me in science fiction; it was the vision of future societies that, for better or worse, would be radically different from our own. This led me on from science fiction to utopian literature, to Plato's Republic, Thomas More's Utopia and Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward, and also to the literature of anti-utopias, to Aldous Huxley's Brave New World and George Orwell's 1984. I have been more interested in other things in recent years, but now that we are starting a new millennium, it is natural to start thinking again about what sort of utopia or anti-utopia might be waiting for us in the future.

There was a great deal of this sort of speculation at the end of the 19th century. The characters in Anton Chekhov's Three Sisters (written exactly a hundred years ago) seem captivated by utopian dreams. Here, for instance, is Colonel Vershinin, in Act II:

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In a century or two, or in a millennium, people will live in a new way, a happier way. We won't be there to see it-but it's why we live, why we work. It's why we suffer. We're creating it. That's the purpose of our existence. The only happiness we can know is to work toward that goal.

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Vershinin's hopes nave not worked out so well in the 20th century. The most influential utopian idea of the 19th and 20th centuries was socialism, which has failed everywhere. Under the banner of socialism Stalin's USSR and Mao's China gave us not utopias but ghastly anti-utopias. It is ironic that in the heyday of utopian thinking, in the 19th century, Karl Marx himself sneered at utopian thought, and claimed to be guided instead by a science of history. Of course, there is no science of history, but that's almost beside the point. Even if we could decide that some type of government or economy was historically inevitable, as Marx believed communism to be, it would not follow that this would be something we would like. If Marx had been an honest utopian, and recognized his responsibility to describe the society he wanted to bring into being, it might have been clearer from the beginning that the effort would end in tyranny. Hitler's Germany, too, started with utopian rhetoric: socialism combined with a maniac vision of a master race.

Even so, I can't believe that we have seen the last of utopiamongering. Indeed, five nonsocia1ist styles of utopia seem (in various combinations) to be emerging in public debate. We had better watch out for people selling these utopias; each of these visions abandons one or more of the grand causes--equality, liberty, and the quality of life and work-that motivated the best utopian ideas of the past.

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The Free-Market Utopia Government barriers to free enterprise disappear.

Governments lose most of their functions, serving only to punish crimes, enforce contracts, and provide national defense. Freed of artificial restraints, the world becomes industrialized and prosperous.

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his style of utopia has the advantage of not depending on any assumed improvements in human nature, but that doesn't mean we have to like it. If only for the sake of argument, let's say that something (productivity? gross national product? Pareto efficiency?) is maximized by free markets. Whatever it is, we still have to decide for ourselves whether this is what we want to be maximized.

One thing that is clearly not maximized by free markets is equality. I am talking not about that pale substitute for equality known as equality of opportunity but about equality itself.

Whatever purposes may be served by rewarding the talented, I have never understood why untalented people deserve less of the world's good things than other people. It is hard to see how equality can be promoted, and a safety net provided for those who would otherwise fall out of the bottom of the economy, unless there is government interference in free markets. ot everyone has put a high value on equality. Plato did not have much use for it, especially after the Athenian democracy condemned his hero, Socrates. He explained the rigid stratification of his Republic by comparing society to the human soul: the guardians are the rational part; the soldiers are the spirited part; and the peasants and artisans are the baser parts. I don't know whether he was more interested in the self as a metaphor for the state or the state as a metaphor for the self, but at any rate such silly analogies continued for two millennia to comfort the comfortable.

In the course of time the dream of equality grew to become an emotional driving force behind utopian thinking. When English peasants and artisans rebelled against feudalism in 1381, their slogan was the couplet preached by John Ball at Blackheath: "When Adam delved, and Eve span, who was then the gentleman?" The French Revolution adopted the goal of equality along with liberty and fraternity; Louis-Philippe-Joseph, duc d'Orieans, wishing to gain favor with the Jacobins, changed his name to Philippe-Egalite. (Neither his new name nor his vote for the execution of Louis XVI saved the duke from the Terror, and he joined the King and thousands of other Frenchmen in the equality of the guillotine.) The central aim of the socialists and anarchists of the 19th and 20th centuries was to end the unequal distribution of wealth. Bellamy followed Looking Backward with a sequel titled simply Equality. It is a cruel joke of history that in the 20th centLiry the passion for equality has been used to justify communist states in which everyone was reduced to an equality of poverty. Everyone, that is, except for a small number of politicians and celebrities and their families, who alone had access to good housing, good food and good medicine. Egalitarianism is perhaps the aspect of utopian thinking that has been most dis-

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credited by the failure of communism. These days anyone who urges a more equal distribution of wealth is likely to be charged with trying to revive the class struggle.

Of course, some inequality is inevitable. Everyone knows that only a few people can be concert violinists, factory managers or major-league pitchers. In revolutionary France the ideal of equality soon gave way to the carriere ouverte aux talents. It was said that each soldier in Napoleon's arnlY carried a marshal's baton in his knapsack, but no one expected that many soldiers would get to use it. For my part, I would fight against any proposal to be less selective in choosing graduate students and research associates for the physics department in which I work. But the inequalities of title and fame and authority that follow inexorably from inequalities of talent provide powerful spurs to ambition. Is it really necessary to add gross inequalities of wealth to these other incentives?

This issue cannot be judged on purely economic grounds.

Economists tell us that inequality of compensation fulfills important economic functions: just as unequal prices for different foods help in allocating agricultural resources to produce what people want to eat, so unequal rewards for labor and for capital can help in directing people into jobs, and their money into investments, of the greatest economic value. The difference between these various inequalities is that in themselves, the relative prices of wheat and rye are of no importance; they only serve the economic function of helping to adjust production and resources.

But whatever its economic effects, gross inequality in wealth is itself a social evil, which poisons life for millions.

Those who grew up in comfortable circumstances often have trouble understanding this. They call any effort to reduce inequality "the politics of envy." The best place for the well-to-do to get some feeling for the damage done by inequality may be American literature, perhaps because America led the world in making wealth the chief determinant of class. This damage is poignantly described in the novels of Theodore Dreiser, who grew up poor during the Gilded Age, when inequality of wealth in America was at its height. Or think of Willa Cather's story "Paul's Case." The hopeless longing of the boy Paul for the life of the rich drives him to give up his whole dreary life for a few days of luxury.

Another thing that is manifestly not maximized by free mar' kets is civilization. By "civilization" I mean not just art museums and grand opera but the whole range of public and private goods that are there not merely to help keep us alive but to add quality to our lives. Everyone can make his or her own list; for me, civilization includes classical-music radio stations and the look of lovely old cities. It does not include telemarketing or Las Vegas.

Civilization is elitist; only occasionally does it match the public taste, and for this reason it cannot prosper if not supported by individual sacrifices or government action, whether in the form of subsidy, regulation or tax policy.

The aspect of civilization that concerns me professionally is basic scientific research, like the search for the fundamental laws of nature or for the origins of the universe or of life-

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research that cannot be justified by foreseeable economic benefits. Along with all the good things that have come from the opening of free-market economies in Eastern Europe, we have seen the devastation in those countries of scientific establishments that cannot turn a profit. In the United States the opening of the telephone industry to free-market forces has led to the almost complete dismantling of pure science at the Bell Laboratories, formerly among the world's leading private scientific-research facilities.

It might be worthwhile to let equality and civilization take their chances in the free market if in return we could expect that the withering of government would serve as a guarantee against oppression. But that is an illusion. For many Americans the danger of tyranny lies not in government but in employers or insurance companies or health-maintenance organizations, from which we need government to protect us. To say that any worker is free to escape an oppressive employer by getting a different job is about as realistic as to say that any citizen is free to escape an oppressive government by emigrating.

The Best-and-Brightest Utopia Public affairs are put in the hands of an intelligent and well-educated class of leaders. his was Plato's vision. In the Republic and other dialogues Plato described a hierarchical society of peasants and soldiers ruled over by a eugenically bred class of "guardians," and in Critias he imagined that this was the constitution of ancient Athens, before the war with Atlantis, 9,000 years earlier. In our own times Lee Kuan Yew, the Senior Minister of Singapore, has said that only an elite, consisting of the top three to five percent of a society, can deal effectively with public issues. The rulers of the "People's Republic" of China would probably agree, except that I suppose they would think that three percent is a gross overestimate. Even democratic COUtltries such as France and Japan recruit their powerful bureaucracies from special educational institutions-the Grandes Ecoles and the University of Tokyo.

The claims of Lee Kuan Yew and others for the effectiveness of "Asian model" technocracies look pretty unconvincing after the East Asian economic downturn of the past few years. Even before that, Amartya Sen and other economists had argued that authoritarian governments do not generally perform better economically than democratic ones, and may in fact be more at risk of economic catastrophe. But rule by an elite has much worse drawbacks.

As Alexis de Tocqueville pointed out, even if government by an elite could be trusted to be efficient and public-spirited, it would have the effect of making its citizens into children. And surely we should have learned by now that no such government

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can be trusted. Behind every Marcus Aurelius is a crazy relative like Commodus, waiting to take over.

There never has been a governing elite in any age that did not eventually come to give priority to its own interests. It doesn't help to choose the elite from some special segment of society.

Attacking Marxism. the anarchist Mikhail Bakunin pointed out that it would be impossible to put workers at the head of government. because then they would cease to be workers and instead become governors. In Looking Bacf...'lvard,Bellamy, like many other socialists, argued that labor unions would become unnecessary once the means of production were handed over to a national industrial army, because then the workers would own their own factories. This argument was not borne out by the experience of labor in the Soviet Union, to say the least. There is no reason to imagine that a ruling elite drawn from business leaders would do any better. H.G. Wells and other utopians have imagined putting public affairs in the hands of scientists, but I know my fellow scientists too well to be enthusiastic about this proposal. Most scientists would rather do their own research than goveru anyone. I have known a number of academic physics departments in which faculty members actively compete for the privilege of not being department chairman.

Anyway, I haven't seen any signs that scientists would be better than anyone else at running a country.

Power is not safe in the hands of any elite, but it is not safe in the hands of the people, either. To abandon all constraints on direct democracy is to submit minorities to the tyranny of the majority. If it were not for the interposition of an elite judiciary, the majority in many states might still be enforcing racial segregation, and at the very least would have introduced prayer sessions in the public schools. It is the majority that has favored stateimposed religious conformity in Algeria and Afghanistan and other Islamic countries.

So what is the solution? Whom can we trust to exercise government power? W.S. Gilbert proposed an admirably simple solution to this problem. In the Savoy opera Utopia, Limited, the King exercises all power but is in constant danger of being turned over to the Public Exploder by two Wise Men, who explain, Our duty is to spy Upon our King's illicities, And keep a watchful eye On all his eccentricities.

If ever a trick he tries That savours of rascality, At our decree he dies Without the least formality.

We just have to get used to the fact that in the real world there is no solution, and we can't trust anyone. The best we can hope for is that power be widely diffused among many conflicting government and private institutions, any of which may be allies in opposing the encroachments of others-much as in the United States today.

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The Religious Utopia A religious revival sweeps the earth, reversing the secularization of society that began with the Enlightenment.

Many countries follow the example of Iran, and accept religious leaders as their rulers. America returns to its historical roots as a Christian country. Scientific research and teaching are permitted only where they do not corrode religious belief is hard t to see why anyone would think that religion is a cure for the world's problems. People have been at each other's throats over differences in religion throughout history, a sad story that continues today in Northern Ireland, the Balkans, the Middle East, Sudan and India. But even fighting over religion is not as bad as an imposed religious uniformity. Of all the elites that can oppress us, the most dangerous are those bearing the banner of religion. Their power is greater, because they can threaten punishment in the next world as well as in this, and their influence is more intrusive, because it reaches into matters that ought to be left to private choice, such as sexual practice and family life. In our own times we have had a taste of what utopias based on religious uniformity are like, in countries like Iran, Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan, where the freedom of women is sharply limited, and holy war is preached to children.

Religious readers may object that the harm in all these cases is done by perversions of religion, not by religion itself. But religious wars and persecutions have been at the center of religious life throughout history. What has changed, that these now seem to some people in some parts of the world to be only perversions of true religious belief? Has there been a new supernatural revelation, or a discovery of lost sacred writings that put religious teachings in a new light? No-since the Enlightenment there has been instead a spread of rationality and humanitarianism that has in turn affected religious belief, leading to a wider spread of religious toleration. It is not that religion has improved our moral sense but that a purely secular improvement in our moral values has improved the way religion is practiced here and there. People ought to be religious or not religious according to whether they believe in the teachings of religion, not because of any illusion that religion raises the moral level of society.

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The Green Utopia The world turns away from industrialism and returns to a simpler style of life. Small communities grow their own food, build houses andfurniture with their own hands, and use electricity only to the extent that they can generate itfrom sun, wind or water.

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his is the sort of utopia that appears most often in modern literature-for instance, in the science fiction of Ursula Le Guin. But modern writers tend to locate their utopias on other planets. No one has described a rural utopia here on earth better than William Morris did in 1890, in News From Nowhere. (His title, by the way, is an echo of More's Utopia, which might come from either the Greek eu- + topos, meaning "good place," or ou- + topos, meaning "no place." The second meaning was also picked up by Samuel Butler, in Erewhon (1872), which of course is "nowhere" spelled backwards-except that it isn't, which shows how hard it is to be perfect.) In Morris' future England, Hammersmith and Kensington are again small villages; the national government has become unnecessary; and the Houses of Parliament are used to store manure. Morris gives a lovely description of the unpolluted countryside seen by his hero in a long rowing voyage from London to the upper reaches of the Thames. It is all very pretty, but some of us would miss urban London.

It is common for those who don't have to work hard to romanticize hard labor, especially agricultural labor. Shakespeare's Henry V imagines that no king can sleep as soundly as a peasant, Who with a body fill'd and vacant mind Gets him to rest, cramm'd with distressful bread; Never sees horrid night, the child ofhell, But, like a lackey, from the rise to set Sweats in the eye of Phoebus and all night Sleeps in Elysium; next day after dawn, Doth rise and help Hyperion to his horse, And follows so the ever-running year, With profitable labour, to his grave.

I doubt that any real peasant would see farm work this way. In the words of Mel Brooks, "It's good to be the king."

Some utopians-like Wells, in The World Set Free-would like to restore the natural environment of the past while keeping the benefits of technology, by radically reducing the earth's population. This seems hard on all those who would be unable to enjoy utopia because they had not been born. Others, like Morris, imagine that a nontechnological utopia could support the same population as at present. I don't believe it, but even if I did, I would object to abandoning the technology that gives us heart defibrillators and elementary-particle accelerators. In fact, Morris cheats. He refers to some sort of "force" that helps with necessary work that can't be done by hand; but how could something like this exist without an industrial establishment?

Hostility to technology also promotes hostility to science, which gets additional fuel from the discomfort produced by what science reveals about the world. In a speech at Independence Hall, in Philadelphia, on the Fourth of July in 1994, the Czech poet and statesman Vaclav Havel protested that "we are not at all just an accidental anomaly ... we are mysteriously connected to the entire universe." He called for "a science that is new ...postmodern." One of the items that Havel

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would like to include in this new science is the Gaia hypothesis, according to which the earth and the living things it supports form a single organism. If the Gaia hypothesis is any more than a poetic way of expressing the obvious fact that life and its environment act on each other, then it is mystical mumbo jumbo, but it has a nice Green tinge that Havel obviously likes. This business of picking out the comforting parts of science and condemning the rest is an old story. The people of future England in News From Nowhere engage in some sort of science, about which Morris says only that it is different from the "commercial" science of the 19th century. This is an amazing comment on the science of Charles Darwin and James Clerk Maxwell.

One gets the impression that the work of science in Morris's utopia consists of collecting pretty rocks and butterflies.

The Technological Utopia The development of information processing, robotics, synthetic materials and biotechnology increases productive capacity so much that questions about the distribution of wealth become irrelevant. National borders also become irrelevant, as the whole world is connected by a web offiber-optic cables. here is a tendency to exaggerate the rate at which our lives will be changed by technology. We still have a whole year to go before 2001, but I doubt that Arthur C. Clarke's vision of commercial flights to the moon is going to come true by then. Individual technologies reach plateaus beyond which further improvement is not worthwhile.

For instance, the experience of riding in commercial aircraft has not materially changed since the introduction of the Boeing 707, more than 40 years ago. (The Concorde is an exception 'that proves the rule; it has never paid for the cost of its development.) Computer technology clearly has not yet reached its plateau, but it will-probably when the miniaturization of solid-state devices runs into the limits imposed by the finite size of individual atoms. Successful technologies also tend to be self-limiting once they become available to the general population. I doubt that it is possible to cross Manhattan from the East River to the Hudson River faster by automobile today than it was by horse-drawn streetcar a century ago. The Internet is already beginning to show the effects of overcrowding. I tremble at the thought of two billion air-conditioners in a future China and India, each adding its own exhaust heat to the earth's atmosphere.

Still, however long it may take, new technologies will inevitably bring great changes to our lives. Far from leading us to utopia, some of these changes may well be frightening.

Technology certainly gives us the power to wreck the environment in which we live. Also, I can't imagine anything more destructive of common feeling among the world's people than a new medical technology that would extend youth for decades but

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would only be affordable by the very rich.

Then there is the problem of what people would do with themselves if technology freed most of them from the necessity of work. As Freud taught, our greatest needs are love and work.

Work gives us a sense of identity and the dignity of earning our living, and it gives many of us our chief reason to get out of the house. In "The Machine Stops," E.M. Forster imagined a world of perfect comfort whose people are isolated from one another within an all-caring machine. Their lives are so appalling that the reader is glad when the story's title comes true.

Some utopians imagine that the problem of work will solve itself. Wells vaguely suggested that after technology had brought universal plenty, everyone would become an artist, and Bellamy thought that when workers retired at age 45, many of them would take up the arts or the sciences. I can't think of any better way to spread general misery. Even a lover of the arts can read only so much new literature, hear only so much new music, or look at only so many new paintings or sculptures, and in trying to choose the best of these everyone will tend to be drawn to the same works. Consequently, whatever joy they took in the work itself, the great majority of writers, composers, painters and sculptors would spend their lives without having anyone else notice their work. The same would apply to scientists. By now it is impossible for a theoretical physicist to read all the papers even in some narrow subspecialty, so most articles on theoretical physics have little impact and are soon forgotten.

Morris excluded modern technology from his utopia not only because he was in love with the Middle Ages but also because he wanted to preserve work for people to do. Although modern technology has made work more unsatisfying for many, I think that Morris was wrong in supposing that this is inevitable. The mindless, repetitive quality that makes routine jobs on assembly lines so hateful is also just the thing that would allow them in the future to be done entirely by machines. Technology creates better jobs, from auto mechanic to astronaut. But there is no guarantee that the advance of technology will provide all people with work that they like to do, and in the short run it converts the badly employed into the unemployed.

One of the things that attract some people to technological utopias is the prospect of a world unified by technology. In the utopia of Wells' The World Set Free all national boundaries are dissolved; there is a powerful world government, a single world language (English, of course), worldwide adoption of the metric system, and interconvertible currencies with fixed exchange rates.

There is still a United States in Bellamy's Looking Backward, but its citizens look forward to eventual world unification.

Physicists (who invented the World Wide Web) already participate in an early version of world unification. For instance, throughout the world we share a typesetting code for mathematical symbols known as LaTeX, based on English. I recently did some work on the quantum theory of fields in collaboration with a Catalan physicist who was visiting Kyoto; we sent our equations (Continued on page 15)

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back and forth between Texas and Japan bye-mail, in LaTeX. I am not so sure that world unification is an unmixed blessing. It has the side effect of shrinking the physiological space in which we live. A few hundred years ago large areas of the map were blank, leaving the imagination free to fill them with strange peoples and animals. Even Queen Victoria, who, it is said, tried to taste every fruit grown in the British Empire, never had a chance to try a mango or a durian. Now we can fly anywhere, and we buy mangoes in our local supermarkets. This is not my idea of utopia. Wouldn't it be more exciting to eat a mango if it could be done nowhere but in India? What is the good of getting somewhere quickly if it is no different from the place one has left?

More is at stake here than just making travel fun again sometime in the future when everyone can afford it. Isolated by language differences and national boundaries, each of the world's cultures represents a precious link to the past and an opportunity for distinctive new artistic and intellectual creation. All these are put at risk by steps toward world unification.

Now I have said hard things about five different styles of utopia-so what do I have to offer? No easy solutions. There is no simple formula that will tell us how to strike a balance between the dangers from governing elites and those from majority rule or free markets, or between the opportunities and the hazards of new technology. I can't resist offering a utopian vision of my own, but it is a very modest one.

The Civilized Egalitarian Capitalist Utopia Production remains mostly in the hands of competing private corporations, overseen by a democratic government that is itself overseen by independent courts; these corporations continue to use high salaries along with status and authority to attract workers and managers with special talents, and dividends to attract capital. Those who receive a high income are able to keep only part of it; to prevent the rest of their income from being simply taken in taxes they give much of it to museums, universities and other institutions of their choice, reaping benefits that range from moral satisfaction to better seats at the opera. These nonprofit institutions use the donations to invest in business entetprises, eventually replacing wealthy individuals as the owners of industrial corporations. otvery original? No, it is in fact a natural development from some present trends. Nonprofit institutions have been the fastest-growing sector of the American economy over the past 15 years. But the tide of American politics now seems to be flowing in the opposite direction. We are in the process of giving up our best weapon against inequality: the graduated income tax, levied on

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all forms of income and supplemented by taxes on legacies. A steeply graduated income tax, if accompanied by generous allowances for the deduction of charitable contributions, has another virtue: it amounts to a public subsidy for museums, symphony orchestras, hospitals, universities, research laboratories and charities of all sorts, without putting them under the control of government. Oddly, the deductibility of charitable contributions has been attacked in whole or in part by conservatives like Steve Forbes and Herbert Stein, even though it has been a peculiarly American way of achieving government support for the values of civilization without increasing government power.

I don't offer this modest utopia with any great fervor, because I have doubts whether men and women will be content with an individualistic life of love and work and liberty and equality.

People have seemed also to need some exciting collective enterprise that, even if destructive, would Iift them out of the everyday round of civilized life.

The individualistic lives of propertied European men at the beginning of the 20th century were about as pleasant as one can imagine: these men moved in a world of elegant cafes, theaters, country houses and relatively unspoiled countryside; their comforts were seen to by deferential women and servants; and for those who cared about such things, there were exciting innovations in science and the arts. Yet there is plenty of evidence that many of these men were afflicted with such boredom and directionlessness that they felt as they went off to the Great War, in 1914, like "swimmers into cleanness leaping." Now war has become intolerable. Perhaps someday we may find a better common cause in the colonization of the solar system, but that is (ar off-and even then most people will be left here on earth.

Can we change ourselves enough to be satisfied with a civilized society? The dream that behaviorists and Marxists had of changing human nature seems to me the worst sort of exaggeration of the capabilities of science. In Three Sisters, Chekhov has Baron Tuzenbach reply to Vershinin's utopian dreams.

Well, maybe we'll fly in balloons, the cut of jackets will be different, we'll have discovered a sixth sense, maybe even developed it-I don't know. But life will be the same-difficult, full of unknowns, and happy. In a thousand years, just like today, people will sigh and say, oh, how hard it is to be alive. They'll still be scared of death, and won't want to die.

Facing a new millennium we can share some of Vershinin's hopes for utopia, but when it comes to judging the chances of really changing the way we live, no doubt most of us would side with Tuzenbach.

0 About the Author: Steven Weinberg teaches at the University of Texas, Austin. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1979. He is the author of The First Three Minutes (1977) and Dreams of a Final Theory (1992).

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Think of Big City America and you naturally think skyscrapers.

Skyscraper architecture characterizes 20th century urban design. The showcase city that embodies much of skyscraper history is New York. Though now newer, taller buildings loom above it, the once-tallest Empire State Building still basks in fame.

or any first time visitor to New York City, it takes a while to adjust to the sight of tall buildings all around. When you emerge from the Penn Station subway on 34th Street in Manhattan, it is like entering a different world. It is as if the picture postcards or the movie sequences which you have seen all the time have come alive and you are standing in the midst of it all.

Look in any direction, you find tall buildings of all shapes and sizes in their full glory. And the buildings do not look artificial or plastic.

They are full of variety, color and life.

Suddenly you realize that skyscrapers can be artistic and aesthetic too. No wonder New York has been dubbed the world's first and foremost vertical metropolis.

As you wander around the streets of downtown Manhattan marveling at the architectural designs and aesthetic beauty of skyscrapers, you want to know more about them, their history and perhaps their future.

The Empire State Building, the World Trade Towers, the Chrysler Building and so on--each one has a story to tell and is part of the rich heritage of the vertical city. For a casual visitor to the Empire State, it may be astonishing to know that the building that was once the tallest in the world was constructed and opened within 20 months. And at the peak of construction activity just 3,500 workers were employed on the site and the tower rose a story a day! Interesting nuggets of information and minute details like this can be discovered during a visit to a unique museum called the Skyscraper Museum, the latest addition to places of art and history in New York.

The museum is perhaps the only of its

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Part of the SJ..-yscraperMuseum exhibit on the Empire State Bui/c(ing, this photo ot' workers was taken by photographer Lewis W. Hine. The exhibit features photos and artifacts from the landmark's inception in August 1929 through the opening ceremony on May 1,1931.

The Empire State Bui/ding was designed, engineered, erected and readied for tenants in just 20 months. The tower rose a story a day. No comparable structure since has matched that ':ate of ascent. 1ts height, including mooring mast, is 102 storiesthe tallest bui/ding in the world from 1931 to 1971.

At 1,250 feet, the Empire State Building surpassed the Art Deco Chrysler Building by 200 feet and the Manhattan Company Bui/ding by 300 feet. Its jivestory base covers two acres and its 85 floors of offices boasted more commercial space than the Chrysler and Manhattan combined.

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Tallis Beautiful

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kind devoted solely to telling the story of the building type that is the crowning achievement of 20th-century architecture. "We want to expand the traditional interpretation of skyscrapers as objects of architectural design, products of technological innovation and as icons of corporate culture," says Carol Willis,

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founder and curator of the museum and author of Form Follows Finance: Skyscrapers and Skylines in New York and Chicago. She says the public should also see these buildings in their urban context as investments in real estate, sites of construction and places of work.

The history of the museum itself is very

The modern New York skyline: the twin towers of the World Trade Center in Manhattan provide background to the Statue of Liberty's salute. Once she was the tallest thing in sight.

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short-it was founded in 1996 as a private, not-for-profit educational corporation devoted to the study of high-rise buildings. In May 1997, it opened its first exhibit called "Downtown New York: The Architecture of BusinessfThe Business of Buildings." It was designed to illustrate how the museum could enrich the city's cultural landscape and it was an unqualified success with some 20,000 visitors.

The following year, the second exhibition, "Building the Empire State," was mounted. It told the story of the building that was the tallest in the world from 1931 to 1971. The building broke every record in the book. At 1,250 feet, it surpassed the Chrysler Building's quirky crown by 200 feet and the Manhattan Company Building by more than 300 feet. Gargantuan in scale, its five-story base covered two acres and its 85 floors of offices boasted 2.1 million square feet of rentable space-more than the Chrysler and Manhattan Company put together.

Most astounding is the extraordinary speed with which the Empire State was planned and constructed. Within just 20 months, the tallest building on the planet was designed, engineered, erected and ready for tenants. Six months after the first structural columns were set in April 1930, the steel frame topped out on the 86th floor. The fully enclosed building, including the mooring mast that stretched its height to the equivalent of 102 stories, was finished within 11 months, in March 1931. No comparable structure has since matched that rate of ascent.

Is it possible to repeat this feat after more than half a century of the Empire State? "I don't think so. The Empire State was constructed from its fust steel columns to the finished building in 11 months time. Such a schedule is impossible today principally because so much more time is required for the modem building's wiring and mechanjcal systems," feels Willis.

"Big Buildings," the latest exhibition of the museum, takes an unconventional look at high-rise size. Ascending height has attracted by far the greatest attention in the study of skyscrapers, but increasing scale has been even more characteristic of the

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evolution of the building type. The exhibit includes 70 structures that over the past century have been either the world's tallest towers or are Jumbos or Super Jumboscategories invented by curator Carol Willis that describe size as measured by volume.

"To qualify as a Jumbo, a building must contain twice the floor area of an average big building of its period. As skyscrapers have grown both taller and bulkier over the decades, the threshold for a Jumbo has increased. Super Jumbos are twice the size of Jumbos," explains Willis. Over the century, there have been only seven Super Jumbos: the Woolworth Building (1913), Equitable Building/120 Broadway (1915), Empire State Building (1931), 30 Rockefeller Center (1932), World Trade Center 1 and 2 (1971,1973), and Sears Tower (1974). he 70 buildings in the show represent all high-rises over the century that qualify either as the tallest or largest in the world, or as Jumbos or Super Jumbos. Nearly two-thirds of these43-were erected in New York, which has been dominant in every period and category. Chicago is a distant second with 15, while the other North American cities of Pittsburgh, Boston, Detroit, and Toronto have one each. The only other skyscrapers worldwide that qualify' as Jumbos are in Pacific Rim countries: there are four in Japan, one in Shanghai, and the twin Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur-which is currently the tallest structure in the world. The second tallest building is the Sears Tower in Chicago.

"There are challengers in development, though their viability remains to be seen," says the museum curator.

A wide range of material on the buildings' development, design, engineering, construction and operation have been shown. There are also architectural models, scale models made for wind-tunnel laboratory tests, construction photos and films, blueprints and computer drawings, rental brochures and other promotional materials and views of interiors.

High-rises continue to excite people involved in their construction as well as general public. The race to build the world's tallest building and the engineering chal-

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lenge of great height have been continuing themes over the century. What drives structures ever higher? Technology, economics, prestige? While advances in technology made taller buildings possible, architects and engineers can design safe structures much taller than clients will build. Willis says supertall skyscrapers are expensive propositions, and their balance sheets are carefully drawn. An owner or developer weighs the high cost of additional stOIies against the anticipated rents or other benefits-including the publicity and prestige associated with premier height.

"High-rises have a good future given the urban densities of many cities in both the developed and developing countries.

Developing, countries may not catch up in aggregate numbers, but where governments see modem office buildings as part of an image of modernity, they will promote high-rise development," says Willis who is so passionate about New York architecture that she has worked full time on the project without pay.

The Skyscraper Museum has had several venues. First, it was located in an exhibition space at 44 Wall Street, donated by the New York Life Insurance Company. Then it moved onto to its present location in the Art Deco banking hall at 16 Wall Street, which incidentally was designed in 1931

by Shreve, Lamb and Harmon, architects of the Empire State Building. 16 Wall Street, once the Banker's Trust Building, is a landmark skyscraper at the comer of Wall and Nassau Streets, directly across from the New York Stock Exchange and the Visitors Center at Federal Hall. The museum will move to its permanent home by summer 2001 in a new building that is coming up at. the southern tip of the Battery Park City. It will occupy 5,000 square feet of groundfloor space in the 38-story building being built by Millenruum Partners. It plans two galleries-one for core exhibit on New York as a skyscraper city and another for changing shows on historical and contemporary issues in international architecture and urbanjsm.

0 About the Author: Dinesh C. Sharma, Delhibased freelance science journalist and columnist, writes on information technology issues.

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President Bill Clinton is about to visit India-a visit anticipated since First Lady Hillary Clinton and daughter Chelsea came here five years ago. It is also the first visit of a President of the United States since Jimmy Carter's visit in 1978.

Ambassador Richard F. Celeste sees it as a significant event for both India and the United States, as he tells SPAN.

What is the significance of President Clinton's visit at this point in time?

This is going to be an historic visit by an American President to India. And it's going to be historic for two reasons. The first is the institution of the presidency. We have not had a president of the United States visit India for nearly 22 years. That is

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Far left: President Clinton appears to be as at home on the road-here, near the Great Wall of China-as he is in a crowd of wellwishers. Above: A fireworks display lights up the Washington Monument during America's Millennium Gala celebration, January 1,2000, in Washington, D.C. Left: Leaders get down to business at the G-8 Economic Summit in Birmingham, May 1998. At the table are French President Jacques Chirac, German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chretien, Japanese Prime Minister Ryutaro Hashimoto, Italian Prime Minister Romano Prodi, President of the European Commission Jacques Santer, British Prime Minister Tony Blair, Russian President Boris Yeltsin and U.S. President Bill Clinton.

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President Clinton with U.S. troops from Task Force Falcon during his Thanksgiving visit to Camp Bondsteel, Kosovo, November 23,1999.

much too long a time between visits. To have the President of the United States come to this dynamic and perplexing democracy and engage with its leadership and its people is vitally important.

In other words, this visit is about more than Bill Clinton. It's about the President of the United States and the Prime Minister of India, and about the people of the United States and the people of India, and the relationship we need to build with each other.

At the same time, this visit will be special because of the keen personal interest of President Bill Clinton, who has looked forward to a trip to India since the moment that his wife Hillary returned from her visit to India in March 1995. I suspect she said something like, "You must visit India. You must get a feel for this diverse, exciting, challenging country." Ever since that moment, President Clinton has had a particular desire to come to India.

Moreover, I know from my own conversations with him that, as he's reflected on which nations will be especially important for the United States and the world community looking down the road 20 or 30 years, India is on the short list of four or five. And, of the countries on that short list, India is the one with whom we have the most work to do in building our relationship.

So President Clinton comes here, I think, with two very special interests in mind. One is a personal interest, stimulated by his wife's affection and respect for India. And the second is a sense of the future, in which he believes that India holds a special importance for the way the world will operate in the years 2020 and 2025 and beyond.

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Are there any particular issues that will come to the fore during this visit?

Contrary to the views of some, I don't believe this visit will be dominated by any single issue. Yes, the President will want to share his thinking on the issue of nuclear nonproliferation and global disarmament. He will want to share his concern about tensions in South Asia and the relationship between India and Pakistan. But most important, the President will want to join with the Prime Minister, his colleagues and the people of India to try to articulate what the next chapter in the history of our relationship should be. Prime Minister Vajpayee set forth the title for this chapter at the Asia Society in New York in September 1998 when he called India and the United States "natural allies."

This chapter should spell out how we translate "natural allies" into mutual action. How do we pursue this relationship in economic terms?

How does the United States contribute to the growth of this great country so as to include all of India's citizens in the prosperity generated by the information revolution? How do we together address the great challenge of environmental protection and insure that economic growth is also sustainable? How do we address nagging problems that challenge our country and India alike: terrorism, narcotics, even computer crime? How do we build on a legacy of collaborative research in the health field that ranges from tuberculosis and malaria to HIV-AIDS and other infectious diseases? Above all, President Clinton is going to want to have a rich dialogue with both the leaders of this country and its people, to learn how Indians see their own future.

He's sprmdingfour or five days here. That's quite a long time for a presidential visit, isn't it?

Four or five days is quite long for a presidential visit in one country. It's rare that he spends more than a day or two in any one place. Those of us who live in India know, however, that five days is a very short time to get a feel for the diversity of this country. I'm hopeful that he will be able to travel as extensively as possible while he's here, in order to see the different faces of India, if you will-not only the different parts of India, but also something of India's great history, something of India's present strengths and especially something of the flavor of 0 India's future.

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The situation is desperate. If poaching isn't stopped, the genpration~ alive today could be the last to know the wild tiger. ndianconservationists are in despair," wrote Belinda Wright, co-founder of the Wildlife Protection Society of India (WPSI), in one of her recent and all-too-frequent e-mails about major seizures of endangered animal parts.

Conservationists like Belinda are increasingly pessimistic about the future of the tiger. During a one-month period at the end of last year and the beginning of this one, skins and parts of at least 20 tigers were recovered in seizures ranked among the biggest in Indian wildlife law enforcement history. One raid netted 3,000 kilograms of illegally-poached deer antlers.

Another yielded 132 tiger claws-representing 18 dead tigers-and an astonishing 18,000 leopard claws-ripped from 1,000 leopards-with 220 blackbuck skins thrown in for good measure. Not only does such poaching eliminate protected species, it decimates the tigers' prey-the deer-who also trim the range grass, thereby preventing wildfires that destroy precious tiger habitat.

"I think it has probably hit the lowest point," Wright told SPAN. She feels the seizures prove that efforts to stop the illegal trade and save the tiger are not working. "I think it's proven something we've been saying for a long time, that the tiger trade is much more sophisticated and well organized than anyone would believe." She adds, "Unless there are some drastic changes, I can't see how we can solve this issue." Voices crying in the wilderness are not enough, she complains, "There is no major political figure in India today who has shown any strong interest in environmental issues, let alone tiger conservation.

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Cloclc,vise from top: Tigress with three cubs, in Kanha Tiger Reserve, Madhya Pradesh; tiger bones are common ingredients in Chinese medicines while others want skins for fashion statements and interior decor; and, male tiger al Ranthambore Tiger Reserve, Rajasthan. Photographs by Belinda Wright.

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There's a lot of interest internationally, but very little interest in India. That's very sad."

International conservationists are also troubled. David Ferguson, wildlife expert from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS), is part of a group who have worked in India since the U.S. began funding conservation programs in the 1970s. He mirrors Belinda Wright's concerns: "To give one statement on the overall problems would be difficult. One aspect is that there isn't support from high levels. This has been complicated by the fact that the government has been unstable and there have been a lot of changes in personnel and policy. So there has not been a real focus on this by the high officials and they may give it lip service, but if they are not practicing it, then obviously the lesser officials are not going to take it seriously either;" He says the trade routes are well established. "Whether these are being managed by one group or many groups I don't know, but those groups are operating fairly efficiently despite the efforts to try to stop them. The national effort has to be tied in much more with the international effort because obviously these things are going out of the country, they go into another network and they go to different places." Because it is lucrative, there is little incentive for the smugglers to stop.

"The rarer these things become, the more they increase in price. There is no incentive for these people to switch from what they are doing. When the thing is gone, they will switch to something else."

Ferguson recommends getting more intelligence and look for ways to intervene, with coordinated national and international enforcement drives. He feels a larger network making concerted efforts is required. "We don't have the strength on our side right now."

India and the United States have worked together on conservation for

decades. Even at the beginning, says Ferguson, "We looked at this as a longrange commitment, because it takes a lot of time to develop a rapport, it takes time to develop agreements, and trust between us." India was one of five range countries hosting endangered animals such as tigers, Asian elephants and Asian rhinoceros, where excess foreign currency funds have been spent to develop conservation programs. These funds are running out.

"We have several projects that are still going and will probably go for the next three years, but after that it will finish. We feel that the relationship with India has been mutually beneficial and we have been exploring mechanisms to keep these things going," says Ferguson. One of those is the Rhinoceros and Tiger Conservation Act of 1994, which funds sustainable conservation programs. This could be extended so technical assistance might continue.

Belinda Wright says U.S. support has been vital. "The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service are the first international funders t? support conservation in India, and they have played a very important role in modern-day conservation efforts in India.

They've been fantastic to WPSI," which is dedicated to fighting wildlife crime.

"They've been consistently good. Also the rhino and tiger conservation fund and the latest elephant fund are open to anyone to put in a grant application. And strangely enough, they are less bureaucratic than many other foundations, and that's pretty amazing."

A $20,000 donation made in January by the United States to Global Tiger Forum aims to promote education, a long-standing goal of FWS. Says Ferguson, "For a conservation program to occur you have to have trained people who know what they are doing in terms of wildlife research, or making recommendations for management or addressing conservation prob-

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Aid for the Tiger

By A. VENKATA NARAYANA

A. hundred years ago people wondered why anyone should be /"\concerned about the tiger. The tiger population was quite large, and the thick and widespread forest cover provided a natural habitat for the animal. But over the years, poaching and increasing encroachment on the tiger's habitat by humans have caused the tiger population to decline alarmingly in India, from approximately 40,000 at the tum of the last century to 1,400 in 1972. With a view to ensure its survival, the Indian Government has placed the tiger in the endangered species' list and also declared it as India's national animal. In 1972 the Indian Govemment launched Project Tiger in nine reserves to recompense the loss the endangered species had been facing.

Once a common sight across the length and breadth of the country, tigers are now found only in sanctuaries and national parks like Corbett, Kanha, Khaziranga, Ranthambore and Sariska and the Sunderbans. It is believed that approximately 4,000 to 5,000 tigers exist today in the wild, though an accurate count is difficult.

"The tiger is an endangered species and is facing serious problems for its survival. But if we plan to protect the tiger we are in fact protecting the rich biodiversity, which is vital for maintaining ecological security and life support systems as well as for providing sustenance to local communities," says S.c. Dey, secretary general of the Global Tiger Forum (GTF), a New Delhi-based nongovemmental organization which has five countries as its members. GTF exchanges information and experience among member countries about ways to save the tigei路. It also helps mobilize the available expertise, within the government and nongovemment sectors, to preserve the tiger and its habitat.

"The onerous task requires international leadership and a common approach to implement the action plans for protection and growth of tiger population," says Dey. To help the effort, the lems. You need to have an infrastructure that they can go into, either govemmental or nongovemmental agencies that actually are interested in this and want this kind of qualified personne!." It must allow for growth and initiative. "Then you need an educational system that is going to feed more people into it. You need a process. I always refer to it as a 'critical mass'-a critical mass of a lot of different disciplines, from research, management and education, all coming together." Such networking makes a big difference, and there has been vast improvement since India upgraded telecommunications and made e-mail and the Intemet accessible.

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U.S. Embassy in January donated $20,000 to GTF, which will be utilized for training of Indian wildlife management officers in wildlife protection and management. The funds will be spent on training 10 officers in wildlife management at the Wildlife Institute of India in Dehradun.

While presenting the check to the Forum, Ambassador Richard F. Celeste expressed hope that the funds will help to strengthen the infrastructure in wildlife management and provide better facilities to stop tiger poaching. Personnel trained under the grant must meet tough challenges posed in the area

Left to right: David Ferguson, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Ambassador Richard F. CeleSTe, S.c. Dey of Global Tiger Forum andPK. Sen, director of Project Tiger, on presentation of the $20,000 check.

of conservation. "Through this collaboration we wish to accomplish the twin missions of protecting the wildlife, on the one hand,路 and, more importantly, preserving and maintaining the ecological balance on the other," said the Ambassador.

Global Tiger Forum's worldwide campaign to save the tiger especially targets developing countries where GTF promotes eco-development programs with full participation of communities living in and around the protected areas.

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Ferguson cites two key areas necessary to stop the trade threatening India's wildlife-good law enforcement-which needs better forensic facilities and backup support. And habitat protection must be decisively addressed. A battle is developing between wildlife and people. "People and wildlife are in competition for resources," says Ferguson. "Obviously, in any confrontation like this, the humans are going to win out over the wildlife."

People have to know that wildlife is important to them before this changes.

"The person who is living at a low subsistence level in direct contact with his environment is dependent upon his cattle

grazing. He knows how important his environment is to him, because he is dependent upon it. The rest of us who' have been removed from direct uses of the environment, if we are educated, we understand our relationship to the environment. There are a lot of people who don't. They are just living in this artificial series where they go to the supermarket and buy something that is packaged or they watch nature conservation on TV or something. They don't have any vested interest in it, but they should, because they are as dependent upon the environment as the person down there with his one little goat."

0

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Drawing by Eric & Bill; © 1998 Tribune Media Services, Inc. All rights reserved.

ON THE LIGHTER

© The New Yorker Collection 1999 Michael Crawford, from Carloonbank.com.

All rights reserved.

SIDE

© The New Yorker Collection 1999 Paul Karasik, from Cartoonbank.com. All rights reserved.

"Can I level with you?-I may look like a bull, but there's a bear inside me trying to get out."

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Great Plains T Flat and vast, America's Great Plains stretch infinitely into the horizon. Writer/ photographer Peter Brown looks affectionately at a region known to many people only as the fields they speed past on interstate highways or the patchwork seen from 30,000 feet on even faster coast-to-coast trips.

he Great Plains are vast, inspirational and complex. They help feed and clothe much of the world, they nourish an important aspect of oW"national psyche, and they comprise one of the most beautiful regions in America. Yet few people other than those living on the Plains know them well-and these people are of limited, even diminishing, number.

Typically we experience the Great Plains from an airplane at 30,000 feet-a vantage point from which we note the tidy grid of roads and section lines that Thomas Jefferson envisioned back in the 18th century-or else we see them from the interstate at high speed. When driving, many of us will make a trip or two into a small town for a meal, and there, we may be momentarily captivated by a world we had thought long gone. More often what we notice as we speed by is an undistinguished flatness shimmering in the heat, concrete embankments, corn, cotton, wheat or soybeans, gas stations, fast-food restaurants and maybe a tourist stop or national monument that tries to recreate a piece of 19th-century America.

I have photographed the Plains for the past decade, and over these years, as I have thought about the variety of experiences that the Plains hold, one repeated but striking contrast has become apparent.

On the Plains, from the point of view of human habitation, there is almost always either too much of something-or else there is not enough. There are basic ingredients lacking, needs that even historically have rarely been met: there is not enough water, there is not enough arable land, and there has never been enough money. Alternately, there is excess, primarily in the form of an overwhelming space, a space so huge that it takes on biblical proportions when coupled with its natural systems-the tornadoes, thunderstorms, hailstorms, dust clouds, floods, droughts, blizzards (even plagues of locusts) that descend regularly. There is too much cold, too much heat, too much space, it's too far to town, there's too much wind, too much dust, too much

time-and far too much horizon.

Yet despite these things people have continued, with varying degrees of success, to live on the Plains for thousands of years. In general we have come and gone-moving over the land with the seasons and game, pushed on by weather disasters or impossible economies. Yet there have also been those who through hard work, ingenuity, determination, luck and occasionally the failW"eof others, have been able to put down roots and stay. Towns have grown and generations have produced generations.

Plains culture exists in historical context of course, and it is a history that is more complex than one might expect, one that includes a Native American way of life that has been dealt with harshly, pioneer agricultural settlements that over many years have moved from small farms to marginally more successful agribusinesses, small towns which once served large populations of farm families but due to farm failures are now often deserted, and larger cities-most of which exist on the perimeter of the Plains and serve the East and the West more than they do the center.

This history has produced a landscape and culture that seem quintessentially American to me: a mix of openness, high spirits, tenacity and carecoupled with wariness, a chronic need for money, and an often stunted respect for the natural world.

I am a longtime visitor to this part of our coun- . try, yet in my lO-year odyssey I have often felt like an immigrant farmer from the 1860s, caught up in forces far more powerful and vast than those bargained on. As I work-photographing and traveling in this landscape-I have become aware of two primary responsibilities: the first, to describe adequately the power, mystery and beauty that fills the region. The Plains are enormous, dotted with surprises, and are more deserving of a purely aesthetic appreciation than we have given them in the past. And second, I realize that I function within a historical context myself, and need to represent clearly what remains from the past, as (Text continued on page 26)

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Swallows, Salt Fork of the Red Rive!; north of Quail, Texas, 1992.

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well as what we compile daily.

The homes, farms, towns and ways of life on the Plains came into being either as a series of responses to the natural landscape-to its space, to its climate or to its occasional rivers and lakes-or else through our human attempts to control and define this space: the Native American hunting trails that over the years have turned into roads; our railroads and the often oddly placed towns that sprang up next to them; or the roads themselves, which generally follow the section lines laid out so many years before. Out of this gridded landscape of town, agriculture and ranching has come a response that to me seems both troublesome and encouraging.

On the troublesome side, a new cycle of weather or market-based problems seems always just round the comer. Absentee owners, of whom there are many, may have less concern for local issues than locals do. Economic need continues, as a transient class of families is forced from one move into another. Single-crop agriculture, which predominates, not only inhibits native plants but many ruin a region if it fails. There is heavy reliance on chemical pesticides and fertilizers. The water table continues to fall. And hostility to native peoples persists, as does a lack of interest in indigenous plants and animals.

On a more positive note (and despite this litany of problems, there is much to praise), those who come to live on the Plains often experience a sense of well-being born simply of existing at the center of such vast, meditative beauty. They may feel a connection to the land and to the cycle of seasons rarely felt elsewhere. They can rely on their communities-on friendships that last lifetimes and on work that is sustaining. Family life is, for the most part, strong, supportive and often multigenerational. And there is little crime, the schools are good, and life, more often than not, is healthy.

Yet always those who live on the Plains seem repeatedly thrown back on geography-on all the flatness and all the space. Whatever one does with it: build, buy, tear down, plant, harvest, run cattle, attract tourists, or bring in money to fill up a dream, there is a lover's quarrel involved with the land itself. On the Plains, for many generations and for many reasons, human life has cycled on with the seasons, moving both in concert with and in opposition to this magically receding, humbling, slowly changing land.

0 About the Author: Peter Brown teaches photography at Rice University in Houston, Texas. He is the author of Seasons of Light and Great Plains.

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New Delhi-based American artist and curator Peter Nagy has taken Indo-U.S. artistic exchanges to a new level with his gallery, Nature Morte.

hen you first meet Peter Nagy you may not associate him with the business of curating. More likely you would mark him down as a hippie (there are still some of those around) who strayed off the Himalayan trail into the city.

It's the bearded, longhaired look, but the deception is also in his loose, languid manner; someone who is perhaps unused to the pulls and thrusts of modem urban living. This impression is dispelled quickly once you begin talking art. For that is where he is at. An American-born artist and curator who is at home with contemporary art in India and the United States or just about anywhere else.

Actually, he is the kind of guy who would feel at home anywhere in the world. Having traveled widely in Europe, the Middle East and Asia, right now Nagy is ensconced in New Delhi as art consultant to Nature Morte, a three-year-old gallery devoted to presenting contemporary art owned by Vishal Dhar and Ritu Walia.

"I was a hippie. That's how I came to India," Nagy says laughing.

"I've wanted to come to India ever since I was a little kid. I wanted to be a hippie. I remember my whole room was orange when I was a kid. I even used to bum incense! But seriously, India was some kind of idea that ran with hippies and I wanted to be one." Still musing, he adds: "Well, after all, it was the Sixties, you know."

From Bridgeport, Connecticut, where he spent his childhood, and Parsons School of Design, New York, where he studied art,

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A Question of Definitions nstallation arthas be~ome a sort of call-to-arms for the Indian art world of the 1990s. It has become the rallying cry of a vast number of artists, spanning three generations, who hope to achieve an urgency and appropriateness for contemporary art which can make a stand both in an international arena and within thejr own overwhelming culture. Coming from outside of India as I have, it often seems that too many things are called installation art here, when they are simply large-sca1e sculptures or paintings which incorporate collage elements.

But there is certainly a necessity for a cohesive label which can symbolize a philosophy and a direction and installation art seems to fit the bill.

Some have claimed that installation art is unnecessary to Indian culture, that it is a by~product of foreign influence and a pandering to international curators, a form entirely redundant as much of the material richness of traditional Indian life, from the temple p;recinct to the pan-waHah's stall, appears to be installation art. Of course, these polymorphous forms of Indian creativity are one of the major reasons why artists from all over the world have long made pilgrimages to India, and surely much art historical sleuthing still needs to be done on the influences of Indian forms on Western artists (and it is my theory that India was the impetus behind the fonnation of installation art in Europe and America in the 1960s). But to claim that installation art is irrelevant and redundant to today's India is.to admit an ignorance of the actual works which are being made

by India's artists. Certainly the works of artists such as Vivan Sundaram and Sheba Chbachhi, steeped they are in contemporary social issues and postmodem theories, are light-years away from anything one would encounter on the street.

The dialogue surrounding contemporary art in India today is fraught with anxiety. This stems from the' great polarities within the art scene itself. On the one hand is an extremely visible and increasingly powerful realm of established painters, whose conservative and regressive works are championed by an aristocratic and moneyed elite wboflaunttheir infatuation with kitsch and general lack of knowledge about art. For them, art is a social accessory and purely frivolous entertainment. At the opposite extreme is a highly educated and stridently intel1ectual art world which strives to create works which are botb morally and historically responsible to both Indian concerns and international dialogues.ln the middle are a wioe range of commercial galleries and public institutions which are becoming the battle grounds for what will be deemed the important Indian art of our times. As we begin the 21st century, there is an increasing awareness of the seriousness of the debate at hand. What is to be determined is who will control the dissemination of contemporary culture, whose voices will be heard and whether democracy will prevail despite the fascism of the marketplace.

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and be more adventurous. So I just came to India."

Nagy arrived in New Delhi in November 1992, without knowing a soul in the entire country. Initially he put up with the family of an Indian friend from Brussels, who was an art collector. "He knew Bhupen Khakkar a bit, and I had done some research and knew who Bhupen was." Khakkar invited Nagy to visit Baroda. "So that first year, I spent a month in Baroda and a month at the Kanoria Art Centre in Ahmedabad. That was my beginning of getting to know the real contemporary scene in India. It was a good start," says Nagy.

For the next few years, Nagy traveled all over the country "studying the culture and getting used to it.'.' He began toying with the idea of opening a gallery because he liked the art scene here. He started visiting galleries more regularly, realizing there was a need for more exhibiting space. "I realized there was a lot of artistic material that was not in galleries at all. That's where I felt I could step in," says Nagy. It took him nearly three years before Nature Marte's maiden show happened. The hardest part for him was finding the people to work with. Then he got in touch with Vishal and Ritu, both of whom had worked in New York and London and knew the art scene there. Recalls Nagy: "I met Vishal in New York where he was working for a prominent gallery. He was attending business school but had good understanding of the New York art world. So he understood , when I said I want to open a gallery in Delhi. We want it to be about Delhi but we also want to look at an international art world and international market. Ritu understood too, because I talked to other people as well and they did not know what I was talking about."

Nature Morte is the embodiment of that vision. It successfully combines Indian and foreign contemporary art that is accessible to all art lovers. In the short span of three years it has notched up a score-plus shows ranging from Vivan Sundaram's installation works to international artists, photography and sculpture. , Says Nagy: "We show everything. We are (Continued on page 59)

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The Vision Thin You think it's easy being a Valley proto-prophet?

advice y is never let a publicist call you a visionary.

I've hung out with the visionaries at the famed Xerox Palo Alto Research Center. I've been a successful Silicon Valley entrepreneur. I wouldn't touch visionary with a la-foot pole. It's like putting Who's Who on your resume, not realizing the whole thing is a moneymaking scam that plays off the vanity of climbers. I'd choose entrepreneur over visionary every time.

It was back in the '80s that they started trying it out on me. In January 1979, I had left Xerox PARC to pursue entrepreneurial ambitions. By June, at 33, I'd founded 3Com Corporation. In another 18 months, I'd raised $1.1 million of venture capital, which in those days was serious money. And in another year, to my naive delight, investors and colleagues started calling me a visionary.

Intoxicated by the flattery, I didn't immediately realize I was being manipulated. I didn't know that nobody really wants visionaries running companies, that visionary is a code word used by investors and colleagues for an unruly guy who, through an acci-

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dent of history, holds a huge chunk of stock in an otherwise promising company.

It's an old story, I know, but I wanted to run the company I'd founded. Everybody else involved wanted me to sit down and shut up.

I aspired to be both the visionary and the CEO. Where visionaries can be good at persuasion, CEOs are good at wielding authority. Visionaries transcend organizations, resources and current realities, while CEOs master them. I wanted to do both: think deep thoughts and recruit the team; accumulate fame and direct corporate strategy; plus, ignore the chain of command, undermine day-to-day operations, and opine endlessly on matters of international importance that had nothing to do with the business at hand.

So I started looking for professional managers to handle daily operations. I expected that they would do what I told them, filling in and handling the dirty details, which, as you'll recall, is where God is.

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But making the visionary-manager relationship work is like letting two bulls into a china shop. Your chosen managers will be winners, in which case you won't be tolerated for long. Or they won't be, in which case you won't be tolerated for long. Either way, there's all that broken china.

My professional managers, led by Bill Krause from HewlettPackard, were winners. In 16 months flat, Krause took the CEO title away from me and over the next eight years grew the company from 12 to 2,000 people.

I figured out quickly, as Krause was wrenching my company from me, that being a visionary means, worst case, being dumped. At best it means being a contributing editor on the masthead of a magazine like Wired. What happens to old visionaries?

They end their days with libraries full of books they've writtenand if they can be happy with that, fine. Too often, though, they're twisted by their jealousy of the people who have made real what they only predicted. Crying in the wilderness is what visionaries do, and in general, they are not very happy with their compensation.

So after my crucifixion, I chose not to flounce off in a huff. But neither did I settle for being the company's pet visionary, although every time I underperformed, the job was offered to me.

Instead, after CEO, I rose again to be vice president of sales and marketing, up through a million dollars a month, and then, as general manager of various divisions, up to $400 million a year, which turned out to be the top of my operating range.

Now I'm fortunate to have a six-story townhouse overlooking the Charles River in Boston. I sometimes host salons there for entrepreneurs, and frequently find myself talking to young MIT engineers who say, Gosh, I hope to be a visionary like you and invent something like Ethernet so I can have a house like this.

Inventing Ethernet didn't get me this house, I tell them. Building a company to make Ethernet and waking up early in hotels for 20 years to sell it got me this house.

There is, of course, a much more famous case of two bulls in a china shop. Steve Jobs is today not the annoying visionary he once was, but CEO and kicking butt at Apple. During his first stint there, though, Jobs played visionary to John Sculley's CEO. They locked horns so09- enough. After Job's expulsion, Sculley tried for a while to be the visionary, publishing his book, Odyssey, and some visionary videos.

Now both Jobs and Sculley, though not reconciled, are out of their respective penalty boxes. Neither goes near the visionary peg. Sculley is a venture "catalyst" who claims to be nothing more than a marketing man. There's another book in the worksnot by, but about, Jobs- who's busy again not predicting but creating the future.

For some, though, the allure of the visionary title is irresistible.

Consider poor Ted Nelson. A couple of years ago I went to hear the hypermedia visionary talk at a big conference in Washington.

In a room with hundreds of seats, there were maybe five of us there sitting at his feet. Apparently, people have grown tired of listening to Nelson bitterly reminding us of what he told-us-so decades ago.

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Of course Nelson did tell us so, in his anthology of ideas about what we would later call the World Wide Web. But then, having the misfortune of being the son of a movie star, which carries the same burdens as being a high school quarterback, he didn't do much about it; nothing, at least, that panned out.

Actually, Nelson wasn't nearly the first to tell us about the Web. MIT's Vannevar Bush laid most of it out in the' 40s, before digital, and J.C.R. Licklider brought it back in the '60s, before personal computers.

Now if there were a Web visionary who had reason to complain, it would be Tim Berners-Lee. He designed the first Web protocols and wrote the first browser code almost single-handedly beginning in 1989, somewhat after but with considerably more impact than Nelson. Berners-Lee is now a cloistered academic researcher at MIT, while Marc Andreessen, who did nothing more than write the third or fourth Web browser as a college student, went on to found Netscape, get rich, and become technical visionary at AOL (a position that held his interest for a total of seven months). And then Andreessen could complain, and has in fact done so in court, about the usurpation of his Web visions by Bill Gates.

Nobody, especially after reading his books, calls Gates a visionary. He's a tycoon.

Bush, Licklider, Berners-Lee, Andreessen, Gates-Nelson will have to stand in line a long time to get all the credit he thinks he's due.

Also speaking at the Washington conference was Doug Engelbart, who'll forever be remembered for inventing the mouse. Engelbart's talk was better attended than Nelson's, but also laced with bitterness. was t my dubious honor to summarize at the conference's closing plenary what Engelbart had said. I told the attendees, some of whom had just woken up from his talk, that Engelbart had not gone over the hill and grown bitterly boring in old age. I told them what I knew from direct experience, that he had been a boring speaker in his prime. I recall falling almost dead asleep in his SRI office in Menlo Park during a lateafternoon job interview in 1972. I'm sure I missed out on quite a lot by failing to listen more attentively. (For one thing, I went to Xerox PARC instead.)

Engelbart got left behind because he embodied his visions in the time-shared computers of his day and missed the detour we all took into stand-alone personal computers. With the emergence of the Web, though, he'll be back. He also recently won the $500,000 Lemelson-MIT Prize for his lifetime of innovation, which has taken the edge off his crying in the wilderness.

One of the best illustrations of the shelf life of visionaries is Xerox PARC, which was a hotbed of them. Perhaps the most famous of the brilliant-research-centers-that-barely-made-anything, PARC was great at nursing big thinkers.

Follow this true tale about how nobody wanted to do the visionaries' shit work. They all wanted to be visionaries themselves.

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In Search of

ovation

You may know it when you see it, but before you can foster innovation in a company or nation you need to be able to get a grip on it. Meet the researchers who are trying to quantify this crucial but elusive process.

bright light shone on the United States as business executives, academics and policy leaders-including Vice President Al Gore-converged on MIT's glitzy Tang Center for the National Innovation Summit. It was the spring of 1998, and as the country savored one of its best economies ever, Harvard Business School professor Michael Porter sobered the powerful audience by pointing to dangers beyond the horizon.

True, U.S. companies had succeeded brilliantly in getting their houses in order, Porter said. But he and MIT professor Scott Stem were analyzing innovation in 25 nations-and preliminary projections from their "National Innovation Index" were not rosy.

Indeed, based on such parameters as international patents filed, R&D spending and share of gross domestic product spent on higher education, it appeared the United States would tumble from the top spot to sixth place by 2005. Porter delivered the news again in January 1999 at the World Economic Forum's annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland. As a summary of the controversial report wamed: "All the good macroeconomic news may be distracting us from looming threats to long-term U.S. economic strength."

The Porter-Stem study addresses vital issues about the future of American competitiveness. But for those interested in predicting future trends in productivity, there's one lingering problem: The index doesn't measure innovation.

Because innovation is an abstract and difficult-to-measure concept, Porter and Stem's index chooses a simpler surrogate: patenting trends. "While it can be argued that patents are somehow related to innovation, nobody has ever established that," says Harvard Business School professor emeritus Richard S. Rosenbloom, a longtime student of the field. Therefore, while praising other elements of the work, Rosenbloom adds, "It is a misnomer to call it an 'innovation index.'"

It's a crucial distinction. In an era of umelenting competition, innovation has become a priority for corporations, institutions

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and nations. Heightened interest is spurring widespread efforts to analyze what underlies the process and assess how firms and countries are doing, because good measurement is central' to effective management.

Yet all efforts to date fall far short of the mark. "It's the holy grail of people working on the management of technologybeing able to measure innovation," Rosenbloom sums up.

"I don't think anybody has cracked it, not yet."

The good news is that those confronting the challenge believe, to borrow a phrase, the truth is out there. Their dedication to the search is engendering a series of promising advances. Patent analyses, despite their shortcomings, form a vital part of the picture. The National Innovation Index and other recent studies are inching closer to the ultimate goal by shedding light on the quality of inventions, not just their quantity. Meanwhile, other imaginative studies seek to identify the unseen "intellectual capital" that gives firms a leg up. These approaches are still in their infancy, but they're already helping to shape the policies of companies and nations alike.

Inside the Black Box Innovation is a tough nut to crack because it involves much more than invention. Truly measuring the process of innovation means going beyond traditional analysis of big inputs such as R&D spending and outputs like patents to shine a light inside the black box of national and corporate competition. It's a problem that spans everything from investment in basic science to research and development tax credits, education systems, corporate programs, inter-industry dynamics and the entrepreneurial culture, all of which combine to fire the innovation process.

Since many of these factors include qualitative as well as quantitative attributes, measuring innovation's inner stuff is enough to give any management guru fits. Indeed, executives

Reprinted from Technology Review magazine. Copyright Š 1999 Technology Review.

Distributed by the New York Times Special Features Syndication Sales Corp.

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Four Pillars of Innovation

By MICHAEL DERTOUZOS

owcan we become innovative, like MIT and the startup companies of Route 128 and Silicon Valley?" That's the most frequently asked question I've heard in the last 25 years, as individuals and organizations in Europe and Asia, but also in the United States, strive to get on the bandwagon of hightech innovation. Thousands of books and magazine articles purport to answer this question. Yet the ones I've seen don't quite match the ingredients I have found to be important among the most successful of the MIT Lab for Computer Science's 60-somecstartUps. Two ingredients, risk-aware capital and a high-tech infrastructure, are Obvious, but rarely in place.InEuropeand Asia investors talk about risk, but their psyches propel them toward the comfort of guarantees. They are not prepared to lose 10 staItups for a 100-fold appreciation in the one that makes it big. In the United States, where capital is usually risk-aware, it is often greedy and lacks staying power-two additional avenues to failure. And in many regions of the world, there is little infrastructure in the form of silicon foundries, design houses and the human experts behind them to ensure that a fledgling high-tech company will have quick and easy access to such key resources.

Perhaps the most important ingredient of successful innovation is the creative technological idea that serves a pressing human need. This kind of creativity, in turn, requires a schizophrenic combination of rationality and insanity that's outside our ordinary experience. Imagine that all current inventions in the world aud all their possible logical extensions and uses are inside a huge balloon. People are pretty good at extending these ideas further, using logic and common sense. But their results, being logical extensions of what's already there, stay within the balloon. To escape these old ideas and come up with something that is radically new, the balloon must be punctured with something that defies reason-a new idea filat is akin to a form of insanity. Yet most insane ideas fail to be creative; they're simply insane. That's why successful innovators, after coming up with an idea that seems crazy, must be able to shift seamlessly to a rational dissection of the idea's merits and pitfalls. When this interplay between insanity and rationality converges, look out! A creative idea has been born.

Conventional marketers and venture capitalists react to creative technological ideas with indignation-"aU you have is a solution looking for a problem"-Dr the mantra-"you better start with a market need, otherwise you have nothing."

These phrases play well in the how-to books, but not in my experience: The successful startups I have known began with what we affectiolTately call a new hack-a radically new

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technological idea-like the Ethernet (3Com), the spreadsheet (Lotus) and public key cryptography (RSA). Sure, a market story is always there, next to the technical idea, but at the beginning, the market is often incorrectly identified: When we invented time-shared computers, we did it to distribute tbe cost of a million-dollar processor among many users. Today, with powerful processors at a few hundred dollars, banks and airlines use this technology for a totally different reason-to share information. The Arpanet, too, was invented to keep costs down by enabling Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency contractors to do their computing on each other's machines. Nobody did that. Iustead, the new networking capability gave rise to e-mail, file. transfers and, eventually, the Internet. In ShOlt, the debates on whether the market or technology should lead innovation are irrelevant: Successful innovators apply their drive and flexibility toward looking for and blending these two forces wherever they crop up, always striving to zero in on the key ingredient-a creative idea that serves a pressing human need.

The other important ingredient of innovation in my experience is an entrepreneurial culture centered on passion: Besides being expert in their craft, the winners are believers, committed unconditionally to their creative idea. To understand how important passion is to innovation, look at "technology transfer" through inanimate designs: In my experience, the people who are handed someone else's invention have no stakt; in it; soonel" or later they find an excuse to abandon it. People think entrepreneurs start companies to make big money. Not the ones I know: They do it fIrst for passion, and only then for money. And where there is no passion, there is usually no money. The right entrepreneurial culture, too, requires a strong leader, who fuels passion and keeps everyone focused on the main mission. And when they fail, the best innovators are ready to move on to their next startup without a second thought.

All four ingredients-risk-aware capital, a high-tech infrastructure, a creative idea that serves a pressing human need, and a passion-oriented entrepreneurial culture-are rare. It's even rarer for them all to come together in a startup. Perhaps that's why so few succeed. But when they do, the rewards are ample: Entrepreneurs derive satisfaction in translating their dreams to useful products and services They and others become wealthy. And the siren song gets louder, beckoning more newcomers to the seductive promise of innovation.

D About the Author: Michael Dertouzos is the director o/Computer Science Lab at the Massachusetts Institute 0/ Technology.

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have struggled with such issues since science steamrolled into business in the 19th century, primarily in the American and German chemical and electrical industries. What's new, though, are the intensity and magnitude of current efforts to track innovation.

The dawn of this modem era is sometimes traced to Harvard

University economics professor Zvi Griliches' 1979 paper, "Assessing the Contributions of Research and Development to Economic Growth." In it, Griliches proposed a theoretical framework for defining and measuring R&D, identifying and tracking its outputs-and charting their economic impact. Not content with theory, Griliches put his ideas into practice in the form of

National Numbers Game t'shard enough to measure innovation at individual companies. But try doing it for nations, where progress waxes and wanes for reasons that run from wars to economic downturns, rendering it exceedingly difficult to make comparisons across boundaries and over time.

The National Innovation Index developed by Harvard's business gum Michael Porter and MIT number-croncher Scott Stem marks one--controversial-attempt.

Sponsored by the Council on Competitiveness, a Washington, D.C.-based alliance of industry, academia and labor, the project aims to measure not just a country's output, but its future innovative capacity-with an eye toward begetting a more infOlmed public policy debate. In particular, Porter and Stem wanted to examine whether the United States was laying the foundation necessary to sustain its productivity edge a decade or more down the roall.

Their study encompassed the United States and 24 other nations, ultimately ranking countries according to real and projected number of international patents per milliowresidents. International patents are considered a better measure of prOductive output than total patents, because firms presumably would not incur the tremendous costs of transnational filings unless the inventions were unusually promising.

Porter and Stem factored in eight variables, from R&D spending and personnel to higher education outlays and the strength of intellectual property protection; the researchers say these meaSUl:escan be statis~ tically weighted to explain 99 percent of the change in a nation's patent rate over time. Assuming a country's commitment to these areas would stay on its same trajectory, they projected future performance.

The results? Not good for the home team. Down tumbles the United States, from the top spot in 1995 to a mediocre

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sixth place in 2005. Japan will rise from third place to first, prophesies the index.

Finland, Denmark and Sweden, joined by tiny Switzerland, all surpass the United States. In explaining the trend, Porter and Stern note, among other factors, that many foreign companies are spending a higher percentage of sales on R&D than U.S. firms, and that Arnerica's scientific and technical workforce is declining relative to other nations.

Not everybody's buying tills downbeat message. One notable critic of the index is Nobel laureate Arno Penzias. The former Lucent-Bell Laboratories research director argues that in today's knowledge economy, many innovations involve the integration of existing technologies in ways that may not be patentable-and so might not turn up in any patent-ba~ed analysis. "We are still using metrics based upon reductionist thinking," he stresses. ''[It's] easier to measure stand-alone inventions than integrative innovations."

What's more, the actual number of patents granted to U.S. residents and corporations is running significantly ahead of what Porter and Stern predict. In fact, patenting by this group in the United States relative to the nation's size and spending had been flat or declining throughout much of tbe 1970s and early 1980s. In 1984, however, it reversed course and has risen at an accelerating pace for the last dozen years.

There are several possible causes for this mysterious patent bubble, including a recent strengthening of the patent-protection system that presumably encourages more filings, as well as a rush of software and biotechnology patenting. However, in a paper published in 1998, Harvard's Josh Lerner and Boston University economist Samuel Kortum examined these hypotheses and others-and shot them down. They noted that if U.S. legal changes were dri-

ving the surge, there should also be an uptick in patenting here by foreign inventors. Not only was the big lise confined to the U.S. side, American inventors were also patenting more abroad, where laws had not been changed. Similarly, Lerner and Kortum found a spike in:fjlings that extended beyond software and biotech to roughly 70 percent of all patent classes.

Their preliminary conclusion is that the United States is winning the innovation race-at least as measured by patents.

"What we are arguing is that, even if the shift in patent policy had a significant impact on firms' willingness to patent..there seems to be some fundamental shift that has happened in the level of innovative activities in the U.S. economy," says Lerner.

He and Kortum theorize that changes in research technology, such as the widespread proliferation of computers and otherinformation technology, more efficient research management or a concentration on the applied activities likely to generate patents could be fueling the trend.

Porter and Stem never claimed to have written the [mal word on measuring innovation. But while their index is far from perfect, they believe their results are close enough to start shaping policy. Indeed, the Council on Competitiveness is using the index's conclusions to push for a doubling of nonmilitary federal R&D spending over the next decade. Council president John N. Yochelson believes the issue to be a critical one. "The bread-and-butter challenge for the country's economic future is strengthening oUr capacity to innovate," he says.

"It is very important that at a time when the U.S. economy is doing well that we ask ourselves what matters ...and particularly how well are we doing in the area of developing the premium products and services that will support a high-wage economy over the long telm."

-R.B.

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the Productivity Program at the National Bureau of Economic Research in Cambridge. It took years to build a foundation for deeper studies, notes program member and Harvard Business School professor Josh Lerner. But in the past decade, with the rise of powerful desktop computing systems that crunch hundreds of equations in seconds, he notes, "there's been a whole flowering of research around these issues."

The most significant initial finding was a strong link between research and development spending and overall productivity and growth. The connection prevails across every level of analysis: national, industrial and corporate. More recently, as the picture has been refined, much attention has centered on the most verifiable output of R&D, i.e., patents. In particular, researchers have devised even more sophisticated ways to rank patents and evaluate them. On the level of individual organizations and firms, such measures are being used to pick potential marketplace winners and losers and even identify shifts in strategic focus.

Who Walks the Walk?

For instance, some cutting-edge researchers believe this approach can be used to pinpoint companies that will outperform their competitors. Francis Narin, president of CHI Research of Haddon Heights, New Jersey, has emerged as a pioneer in assessing firms' technological strength. Narin believes that, in looking at the patents a high-tech fIrm generates, three variables are crucial: "citation intensity," "science link" and "technology cycle time."

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Citation intensity gives an indication of how influential a particular patent is based on how often it's cited in other patents.

Science link represents the number of scientific papers cited in each patent, and technology cycle time is the median age of the patents cited in all of a company's recent patents; these last two measures form a way of quantifying the widely held assumption that the most innovative patents are closest to the forefront of science and technology.

Narin has long combined these three factors to rank firms in key high-tech industries. Now, however, he's going beyond just measuring to try to prove that high marks on these scales payoff financially. In a study published last spring in Financial Analysts Journal, he teamed with New York University finance expert Baruch Lev and doctoral student Zhen Deng to find out whether technological strength itself is an indicator of a firm's future financial performance.

The trio's hypothesis was that a company whose portfolio contains highly cited, science-rich patents is likely generating innovative technology, providing a marketplace advantage that will show up in future stock prices and market-to-book ratios-the stock price in relation to the value of a firm's hardcore financial assets. All told, they studied 388 companies in four high-tech sectors: chemical, drugs, electronics and "others."

Narin, Lev and Deng compared company results against industry averages, then gauged each firm's market performance over the next year or longer. In line with their hypothesis, the market-to-book ratios of companies with high citation intensity and high science linkage outdid those of companies ranked low

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in both categories by 25 percent. These "high-high" companies also tended to do better in the stock market, though results were more mixed.

Since just about every company these days claims to be "innovative," more sophisticated methods are needed to find out who walks the walk and who just talks the talk. Narin thinks his research can help. Armed with refined stock-picking parameters, in last July he launched Investor Tech-Line, a $15,000-ayear database that provides monthly rankings of 250 firms to institutional investors.

By comparing actual market-to-book values to his technology-based ratios, Narin classifies companies as overvalued or undervalued. To get an idea of the power of the approach, consider this: A portfolio of equal dollar investments in Narin's 20 most undervalued stocks from last December 31 would have increased 50 percent over the next six months-a time when the S&P 500 rose only a few points. Beating the market by such a large factor "blows your mind away," Narin says.

"We Show the Money" Part of the value of this analysis is that it can go beyond picking winners and losers to offering insight on a company's technology strategy. Take Dow Chemical. The Midland, Michigan, giant slipped from 455 patents in 1989 to 263 in 1995 (although it still patented at twice the industry rate). Meanwhile, Dow was laying out substantially more to come up with each patent than its competitors, while its citation intensity ranked below the industry norm.

But that was only part of the story, because another Narin-Lev measure shows that Dow was getting much closer to the cutting edge: Science linkage had grown significantly, from below the industry average to almost double it. Technology cycle time, meanwhile, ran at the industry average. These two measures taken together indicated that Dow was patenting developnlents close to the cutting edge of science, as fast as competitors turned out more standard inventions.

The study tracked firms as a group and not individually, and therefore the researchers didn't check with Dow officials to find out whether these findings did indeed reflect changed internal thinking. But TR contacted Dow R&D vice president Richard M. Gross, who confirms that around 1990 his company did alter its strategy.

The strong science linkage, for instance, stems from a concerted push into new growth arenas that hinged on developing a more fundamental understanding of the science behind both its core existing businesses and promising emerging areas. For example, research into metallocenes-a new class of catalysts used to make plastics with more precisely tailored properties-allowed the company to develop improved polymers vital to everything from cushioning for high-end athletic shoes and sports equipment to thinner but stronger garbage bags.

This science focus was linked to a broader push to raise patent quality. "We had encouraged quantity historically, as a

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lot of companies had," Gross acknowledges. Indeed, the sincedismantled patent honor roll at the main R&D building in Midland spanned an entire wall, with brass plates bearing the names of top inventors. But as competitive pressures forced Dow's Inventions Management group-now called Intellectual Asset Management (IAM)-to examine the costs and returns associated with this vast portfolio, it got a shock. "We had a $40 million liability on just patent costs," relates Sharon Oriel, an lAM manager, "And yet we couldn't show that other partwhat's the value."

That wake-up call triggered a vigorous campaign to drop, spin off or license patents that didn't fit the needs of Dow's 14 global business groups, and target future patenting more closely on the company's objectives. Working with Cambridge, Massachusettsbased consulting firm Arthur D. Little, lAM has developed proprietary methods of tracking patent status, costs and benefits, which it uses to facilitate business group planning. Oriel says this provides a new dimension to measuring innovation that resonates (Continued on page 43)

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The First President's Virginia Homestead

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wo hundred years ago last December, on the eve of a new century, the nation learned with shock that George Washington's life had ended. He was only 67, and just two years had passed since he had turned down the call to serve a third term as President. The day before his death he had made his normal ride (through a snowstorm) to inspect his farms and marked trees for cutting. After Martha's retirement for the night, he sat up talking about the news with his secretary, Tobias Lear, in the front parlor at Mount Vernon, where he had so often played cards or taken tea.

Then he went upstairs to the bed he shared with Martha. He woke after midnight with a piercing throat pain and by the morning could not swallow. Doctors were summoned; he was bled; poultices were applied to various parts of his body; but he would never leave the room again.

He was dead before midnight.

If you go to Mount Vernon today, you will find the room arranged just as he left it, surgical instruments and all. The bed where he died was given back to Mount Vernon in 1908; but Martha's chest of drawers has just returned after an absence of 197 years, loaned by the Tudor Place Foundation. The chair by the fire, in which Washington tried (ineffectually) to ease his pain by sitting up, has been loaned by the Smithsonian Institution. The house has never had so many of its original furnishings since heirs took property off after Martha's death. For this year's special exhibit, called "Mount Vernon As It Was," more than a hundred items have been reassembled, over half of them original possessions of the Washingtons'. The rest are pieces of the time and style that they were known to possess.

Above lefi: From 1754 until his death in 1799, Mount Vernon, on the Potomac River in Virginia, was the home of George Washington (left, in Gilbert Stuart's famed 1796 portrait). Far left: A painting depicts George and Martha Washington entertaining visitors--ofwhom there were always a great many. Top right: Washington put his family's coat of arms within the scroll pediment of the front parlor's overmantel. Right: The small family dining room was redecorated by Washington at least twice. He said he found the room's verdigris tones "grateful to the eye."

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Clockwise from left: Originally a rectangular shape, the upper garden was redesigned by Washington in 1785 with more curved, natural lines; the secretary in Washington's study was crafted in 1797

by Philadelphia cabinet-maker John Aitken, the English globe has not left the house since it was bought in 1790; Washington died on December 14,1799, in the bedroom he shared with Martha.

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If you go back down to the front parlor where he read the news on the eve of his death, you will find Washington's own tea service on its table (the table loaned, again, by the Tudor Place Foundation). The cards and games Washington liked to play are laid out. James C. Rees, the executive director of the Mount Vernon Ladies' Association, calls this "the most beautiful room in the house." The intensity of the Prussian-blue color on its walls may surprise modern visitors-but it was the height of fashion during the period when Roman styles, discovered at Pompeii and elsewhere, led Robert Adam in England to create bright polychrome interiors for his houses. The Prussian blue gains a special vibrancy from its streakiness, which is deliberately achieved by application of the paint with varying pressure on the brush.

The fact that Washington was so interested in the stylistic features of his house will also surprise people. Thomas Jefferson is often considered the founder who had a monopoly on artistic interests and taste.

But intensified study of Washington has revealed a man with a vision as powerful for his personal realm--centered in Mount Vernon-as for the national capital he planned at the city named for him.

Washington was successful in building up his huge plantation (approximately 3,200 hectares) and making it pay, at a time when most Virginia owners (including Jefferson) operated deep in debt and behind the business cycle of their day. Washington integrated his farms, gardens, buildings, industrial enclaves and beautiful vistas into a well-conceived entirety, as pleasing aesthetically as it was practical.

The great house, Mount Vernon, stood at the hub of this little domain, itself an organizational masterpiece, expressing Washington's notions of ordered efficiency. It was at once the headquarters of his planning and the center of a hospitality that reflected democratic ideals. We have been led to think of Washington as remote and cold, but what's astonishing about Mount Vernon-recreated now in all its warmth-was its accessibility. An aspiring young architect from England, Benjamin Henry Latrobe, could show up unannounced at Mount Vernon in 1796

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(while Washington was still President) and be entertained as if he were a family friend. Washington was a sociable man who liked to dance, play cards and talk with young and old-Latrobe says that he "laughed heartily." In a typical year in the 1780s, Washington had nearly 700 visitors stay overnight. There were six guest bedrooms in the mansion. The dependent building connected to the main house on the north (a building just restored) was a slave residence, for the personal servants of the mansion's visitors. (Washington had to recognize the realities of the Virginia society around him, though he would arrange for all his own slaves to be freed after the death of his wife.)

Martha Washington was an experienced hostess, used to making everyone feel at home. During the Revolution she packed her china and linen in wagons and went north to keep the officers' table at their winter quarters. A veteran of the severe winter at Valley Forge, she was not one to be intimidated by the heavy demands of Mount Vernon's hospitality. The large formal dining room added to the north end of the mansion received so many dinner guests that a regular table was not kept there-boards were placed on trestles, then overlaid with linen, Sevres porcelain and silver to suit the number of people who would be dining.

T

his formal room, two stories high, has all the elegance of the Adam style, with a large Palladian window and elaborate relief designs on the plaster ceiling. Its beauty is balanced, at the other end of the house, by a utilitarian extension created for Washington's study.

Here he kept his records of crop variations and rotations. He tried over 60 different crops, determined to break the dependence on soil-exhausting tobacco yields. Like Jefferson, he experimented with his own forms of improved plows. Working in this room, he invented an ingenious 16-sided treading barn in which animals on the upper story trod wheat so as to let the grain fall through slits in the floor to lower receptacles. A replica of that structure has been raised on the grounds.

The study's bookshelves held about 900

volumes. Washington's voluminous papers, and work on his projects, made this room off-limits to most people, since he needed a place to think and write amid the humming activities of this social nexus.

An inventory made the year he died shows that there were 12 telescopes in the study-for identifying boats on the Potomac or for scanning the fields as he rode over his plantaMartha tion's five connected farms. He also had Washington seven swords, some was a deft of them ceremonial hostess who gifts. He left five made everyone of these, in his last feel at home. will, to his five nephews-"with路 an In a typical injunction not to year in the un sheath them for the 1780s, they purpose of shedding had nearly blood, except it be for 700 visitors self defense, or in destay overnight. fense of their Country and its rights; and in the latter case, to keep them unsheathed, and prefer falling with them in their hands, to the relinquishment thereof."

It is said that, in the case of Jefferson's Monticello, the house is the man. The same can be said of Mount Vernon and Washington. They were very different men, and their homes reflect that difference.

Both gave great thought to the shaping of an environment that would express their innermost values. Jefferson built on a mountaintop, away from mankind, and loved best his solitude there. He began his work from scratch and spent years tearing down and starting over in order to perfect his vision.

Washington began with an existing structure, the house he had inherited frqm his admired half brother Lawrence. With customary frugality, he did not rebuild this core of his later mansion in order to conect its flaws-low ceilings, an off-center door, irregularly placed windows. But he hid or minimized those defects as he added to the building according to his means-first putting an extra one-and-a-half stories above the original frame, then adding the extensions at either end: a public entertaining area and a private workplace, the two sides of his life.

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From his library at Mount Vernon, Washington managed the estate and conducted the correspondence that gave impetus to the founding of the United States.

The desk, accompanying chair and the built-in bookcase are, along with the globe, among the original Washington furnishings.

On the land approach to the house, arrived at through carefully landscaped avenues, he put a "floating" pediment, one with no order of columns to support it. Low and wide, the pediment's placement cheats between the off-center door below and the centered cupola above. This so successfully confuses the issue of centrality that most people never notice the asymmetries.

The broad reach of the pediment unites the discordant elements. It is an architecturally "incorrect" feature that is a master stroke.

On the other side of the house, he covered the odd fenestration with the building's most identifiable feature-a long piazza

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thrust out in front of the facade, behind eight widely spaced pillars that are the most imitated element of any house in America.

In good weather much of the building's activities took place in this shaded porch, with its spectacular view of the Potomac.

Latrobe recorded how the family sat there on one July evening after dinner, and he made a watercolor sketch of the tea that Martha had earlier presided over at its breezy comer.

Washington added to the house as he could afford to, wasting nothing, preserving the heritage of his family, but perfecting what he preserved with touch after touch of careful attention and quiet elegance. Each room inside has a different character, its ornamentation and furnishings considered in minute detail by Washington. The design motifs inside are not military but pacific, with rural and farming decorations-and the cupola above carries a dove of peace. There is Iit-

tie of the soldier here. He fought only to come back to the farm he loved, a farm he had denied himself the sight of for six long years of fighting.

Monticello is a place of airy intellectual adventure. Mount Vernon is a place of weighty moral responsibility, presenting the beauty of a realized civic humanism. Henry Adams, who spent decades writing his study of Jefferson's presidency, took the. characters in his novel Democracy to visit Mount Vernon in its 19th-century semiruinous condition-and even then the moral ideal embodied here made his heroine say that she felt unclean, somehow, in this place of towering integrity. That is something Adams would never have said about Monticello.

0 About the Author: Garry Wills has written American history books which include Cincinnatus: George Washington and the Enlightenment and the Pulitzer Prize-winning Lincoln at Gettysburg.

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In Search of

In.novation

continued from page 37

with what the "show-me-the-money" business groups have always wanted from research. Now her group wears T-shirts that say: "We show the money."

Intellectual Capital Moving beyond a broad-brush approach to dissecting the relationship between patents and innovation marks a big step forward.

But patents certainly don't tell the whole story. In today's knowledge economy, many innovations are simply not patentable. Some of the most creative manufacturing and distribution companiesthink Dell-won't appear on any yardstick that tracks intellectual property. As a result, a lot of attention is shifting to other scales.

Perhaps most notable is what's often called "intellectual capital"the sum total of the seemingly "intangible" knowledge, processes, culture, customer and supplier networks and other factors that can ignite industrial creativity.

Intellectual capital might be the hot zone of gauging innovation today. New York University's Lev notes that in the manufacturing economy of the 1970s, the market-to-book ratio of S&P SOO corporations ran about 1:1. These days, it's around 6:1, while high-flyers like Microsoft come in around 2S:1-largely on the basis of their intellectual capital.

"It's really mind-boggling when you think about this whole accounting machinery that ends up with a balance sheet that explains less than one-sixth of a company's real value," says Lev. "So we are talking here about an enormous asset which really is the engine of the success of companies and growth."

Earlier last year, Lev compiled a Knowledge Capital Scoreboard for CFO magazine ranking 47 large chemical and pharmaceutical firms. He and portfolio manager Marc Bothwell of BEA Credit Suisse Asset Management analyzed each firm's earnings for the past three years, as well as its projected earnings for the next three years. From the weighted average, or "normalized" earnings, they subtracted expected returns on tangible assets such as bond portfolios and physical equipment; the remainder, they assumed, represented knowledge-capital earnings.

For companies that are knowledge-rich, this kind of capital is a huge part of their success. Take Merck, considered one of the scientific leaders in drug development. In this analysis, Merck's normalized earnings were $S.S billion. Its physical assets were expected to generate $343 million annually, while some $624 million in financial assets were projected to earn $28 million. That left a whopping $S.l billion a year attributed to knowledge earnings. According to Lev's formula, this represents the return on intellectual capital assets totaling nearly $SO billion-which moved Merck to the top of the pharmaceutical pack, ahead of others with greater sales.

Intangible Assets Studies like these are themselves on the cutting edge of their own field of research. For that reason, they entail a large number of assumptions that remain to be tested in subsequent work. Still, Lev's studies are helping fuel a growing movement to get companies to produce such data in quarterly and annual reports, much as they generate traditional financial information. Indeed,

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following a three-day intellectual capital symposium lTI Amsterdam last June, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development reported widespread international support for the voluntary reporting of knowledge assets.

On this front, the clear pioneer is Skandia Life Insurance, a Stockholm-based global financial services powerhouse, which has published an intellectual capital supplement to its annual report since 1994. The supplement has tracked turnover rates, the number of contracts generated per employee and the percentage of women managers. It also includes stories meant to illustrate trends behind the figures.

A story in the 1998 supplement called "Female Potential," for example, centered on a Skandia program aimed at bringing more women into sales leadership. The goal, according to the piece, was "to obtain more female leaders, and to actively eliminate obstacles to the realization of the full development potential of these women and add to the collective value-creating process within Skandia." Toward that end, each woman was paired with a "personal mentor" from a different business area. "The mentor's role is to be a dialogue partner and to be on hand for support and advice, while facilitating the candidate's continued development and career in the company."

If it all seems a bit touchy-feely, it's because innovation itself' is still a somewhat mysterious combination of work, skill, inspiration and environment. But for companies concerned with staying on the leading edge, such factors have become paramount.

Now corporations are taking fresh looks at the whole value-creation chain, seeking to maximize returns on everything from employee-training prograrns to the colleges of expertise that enable people to share knowledge and skills.

Mark B. Myers, senior vice president of Corporate Research and Technology for Xerox, concedes that astute managers have always paid attention to these issues. What's different now, he argues, is that the efforts are more sophisticated and they're starting to tease apart the deeper elements of innovation.

Over the past two years, Myers has worked with Harvard Business School's Rosenbloom to develop methods for determining whether Xerox is investing correctly in key elements of innovation. This undertaking, which involves tracking decades of R&D expenses against revenue growth and benchmarking Xerox's investments against those of principal competitors, is still confined to tangible measures. 'But Myers is hoping the effort will lead him to greater inroads on the intangibles as well.

After all, he notes, "a higher portion of the value creation in a knowledge-based economy versus a manufacturing economy may be contained on the intangible side."

To the extent that Xerox is onto something, it will still represent a rare victory for the measurement forces. Nevertheless, a host of corporate leaders, academics and others remain bent on prying the lid off innovation's black box. Each success promises 0 to help the gears inside turn more smoothly.

About the Author: Robert Buderi is contributing editor oj Technology Review magazine.

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The cars of tomorrow -hybrids, natural gas-powered sports cars and fuel cells-are here today,

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aybe you think driving a car that runs on anything other than gas is as preposterous as the idea of an underpowered Ferrari or a nonsmoking supermodel. But if you don't believe we are at a scientific, political and social crossroads regarding the beloved automobile, imagine going to Congress today to propose mass production of a new personal mobi~ity device: It would weigh roughly 25 times the weight of its occupant; it would use a nonrenewable fuel whose emissions would pollute the air and accelerate the greenhouse effect; and it would be built mostly with nonrecyclable materials. Good luck, right? Which is why the world's major car manufacturers are spending hundreds of millions of dollars annually to reinvent the automobile.

As money like that will tell you, this is no whim, no marketing ploy to sell new vehicles. In addition to compelling environmental reasons, there are strong regulatory pressures forcing automakers to reassess the car's basic constitution. As a result, manufacturers are scrambling to do a great deal all at once, from making cars lighter, cleaner and more efficient to creating the alternative fuels-natural gas, methanol, hydrogen-that might power them. The long-term goal is the hydrogen-powered fuel-cell, a system that does away with dirty internal combustion in favor of a clean chemical reaction that produces ...water.

So how do you get from here to there? "We'll see fuel-cell technology in our lifetime-I 0,20 years from now-but it's uncertain which paths will be the light ones," says Larry Bums, vice president of research and development and planning at General Motors. "So everyone's working on fuel cells, hybrid vehicles and cleaning up internal combustion engines. There's no silver bullet." Bernard Robertson, DaimlerChrysler's senior vice president of engineering and technology, agrees: "By 2010, one could picture a mix on the road-superclean gas engines coupled with hybrids and fuel cells." Because none of the carmakers can afford to go down all those roads, they are collaborating on R&D. DaimlerChrysler and Ford are investors in Ballard, a fuel-cell manufacturer. Toyota and GM have hooked up to work on hybrid vehicles and fuel-cell technology. BMW, VW and Mercedes are discussing the merits of various fuel-delivery systems.

If you look carefully, you'll see a significant amount of futuristic technology already out there. At Budget's EV (environmental vehicle) Rental Car desks in the Los Angeles and Sacramento airports, you can rent Honda's natural gas-powered Civic GX (the cleanest-running internal-combustion engine in production). Or you can try one of several electric vehicles-a GM EV 1, Ford Ranger EV, Honda EV PLUS, or Toyota RAV4-EV -and get free recharging at 100 stations in Sacramento and at more than 300 in Los Angeles. Natural gas-powered taxis can be found in New York City and Hartford; a few hydrogen-powered fuel-cell buses operate in Vancouver and Chicago. In the next few months Toyota and Honda will introduce hybrid gas-electric vehicles to the U.S. market.

And yet, because Americans still love their SUVs and their low gas prices, manu-

M

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This Dodge Charger concept vehicle is among the new automobiles designed to satisfy a market with an environmental conscience. Its super-charged 325-hp 4.7 liter V-8 runs on natural gas. Below: The experimental BMW tanks up using an alternative fuel delivery system. Natural gas and hydrogen powered fuel-cell vehicles have already hit North American roads.

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facturers are having trouble persuading the public to experiment.

Says GM's Burns: "It's all about trying to make a car environmentally friendly, but it must appeal to customers and be commercially viable-not just available." After a few costly flops, manufacturers are paying more attention to consumers' desires. "If we want buyers to accept environmental benefits, we also have to offer them utility and performance," says DairnlerChrysler's Tom Kizer, director of powertrain and electrical engineering. It's like slipping oat bran into sugared cereal-as long as we get what we want, we won't mind if some healthy stuff is thrown in. A good example is Dodge's natural gas-powered Charger Rff prototype, whose gutsy V-8 proves that alternative fuels can offer performance comparable with that of gas.

It probably won't be tomorrow that you find an electric or hydrogen-powered vehicle in your driveway, but it won't be too long. So you should know what's happening. It's pretty cool.

W

hile the spotlight is on the more exotic fuels, the vast majority of cars are still gas-powered, and these days so much is being done to clean up gasoline that it's starting to look like an alternative fuel itself. "The emissions are infinitesinlal," says Dave Hermance, Toyota's executive engineer for environmental engineering. Starting with model-year 2000, Ford is making all of its pickups and sport utilities adhere to LEV (low-emission vehicle) standards. (It isn't worth going into specific particle counts here, but suffice it to say that a '99 LEV Ford Explorer, for instance, is 42 percent cleaner in terms of carbon dioxide, hydrocarbon and nitrous oxide production than the non-LEV '98 version.) Honda produces ULEV Accords and Civics (ultra-low-emission vehicles are 50 percent cleaner than LEVs), Toyota a ULEV Camry, and DaimlerChrysler a ULEV Neon. And Nissan, Honda and Toyota all have gas engines that meet SULEV (super-ultra-low-emission vehicle) standards-one-tenth the emissions of an LEY. SULEV Sentras and Accords are expected to hit the market this year.

Manufacturers are experimenting with several gas alternatives. "At various times over the past 10 years, DaimlerChrysler has sold methanol, ethanol, compressed-natural-gas and propane vehicles," says Robertson. "Frankly, none has been a big market

This DaimlerChrysler Necar 4 is afourthgeneration hydrogen-powered fuel cell, housed in a Mercedes A-Class. The fuel cell fits under the seats.

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success. That hasn't discouraged us, but it has made us aware of how important it is that the market comes along with us."

The first step toward making a viable fuel cell is deciding how to power it, since delivering the more exotic (and sometimes toxic) hydrogen-producing fuels to consumers requires a whole new distribution system. Given that there are just 1,312 natural gas stations in the U.S.-only a few of which are open to the public-building access to the even harder-to-handle fuels is further off. "Resolving infrastructure issues is more difficult than building the car," says BMW's project manager of research and development Ralf Frochtenicht.

I

believe the electric vehicle is dead," says Frochtenicht.

Others reluctantly agree. GM was the first manufacturer to put an electric vehicle in the public's hands: the nearly silent, Citroen-esque EVl, which California Saturn dealers got in 1996. Since then about 600 have been leased. Even though GM is switching from heavy lead acid batteries to advanced technology nickel metal hydride batteries this year, the range on the EVI (and other electric vehicles) is at best 225 kilometers per charge-not within most Americans' comfort zone. "The EV 1 was a leadership move on our part-we learned a lot about manufacturing technologies," says GM's Burns. "But we still don't have questions of cost, battery mass or range answered."

Toyota, which has the most electric vehicles of any manufacturer on the road-more than 600-has also been disappointed with the cars' range.

For good reasons, however, most cannakers will continue their work with electric .vehicles. By 2003, California will require that up to 10 percent of cars sold in the state be zero-emission vehicles, and today only electrics meet that standard. More important, all the development work done on these early cars can be directly applied to hybrid and fuel-cell vehicles, which use electric motors. Also, electric cars do make sense in some situations-in urban vehicle-sharing programs, say, Ford's annoyingly named TH!NK, a two-seat electric city car made in Norway, is a good example. Its matte-finish thermoplastic body (think ski boot) is easy to build-only 370 parts-and recyclable. And because no paint or water is used to make the car, its factory produces no emissions (nor does the car, of course). "The bigger the vehicle, the bigger the batteries. So electric is better for niche applications," says John Wallace, director of Ford's TH!NK Group. "Our electric Ranger pickup uses foUr tinles the batteries the TH!NK does." Ford plans to test the little car in select North American cities this year.

I

maginea car that has two powertrains: one gas, one electric.

The gas engine consumes fuel, while the electric system recaptures energy from braking in the form of heat, as well as power from the generator and regular battery (which is in turn recharged by the gas engine). The stored electric energy can later be used to

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boost acceleration or to run the car during idling, enabling it to bum less gas. The two systems seamlessly switch back and forth, so drivers don't feel much of anything. There's no need to recharge-that happens automatically every time you stop-and you can get phenomenal range (up to 1,100 kilometers) and fuel efficiency (up to 30 kilometers per liter).

The challenge with hybrids is that two separate powertrains require more hardware, which can raise their price. But there are ways around that. DairnlerChrysler, for instance, recently showed a concept vehicle called the Citadel-a cross between a sedan and an SUv. The electric system boosts the Citadel's power from that of a V -6 to that of a V -8. With electric power on the front axle and a gas-powered engine on the rear, you have a four-wheel-drive system without all the expensive parts normally needed, which offsets the costs of the second powertrain. Says Tom Kizer of DaimlerChrysler: "If you're going to improve fuel economy, do it on the vehicles that bum the most fuel. A 20 percent improvement from hybridization on an SUV saves a lot more fuel than a 20 percent improvement on a Neon. Plus [you get improvement on] greenhouse gases and emissions."

Many executives predict that because hybrids are so easy to use, they will be the first alternative cars for most drivers. Two models, the Toyota Prius and the Honda Insight, will soon be available in the U.S. Toyota was first to mass-produce (in Japan) its four-door, five-passenger gas-electric hybrid, which it plans to bring to the U.S. this June. "The vehicles going to North America get 23 kilometers per liter, and they're better in the city than on the highway because of increased braking," says Toyota's Hermance.

Honda, which launched the Insight last December, is taking a different approach. Unlike Toyota's Prius, the Insight is an options-heavy, sporty two-seater that gets up to 30 kilometers per liter. Honda plans to market its high-tech aspects as a benefit, not as penny-pinching features. "The worst thing we could say about this car is that it beats the Geo Metro by 13 kilometers per liter," says Robert Bienenfeld, Honda's sales and marketing manager for alternative-fuel vehicles. "That would drive people away.

This car is nimble and fun, and doesn't talk down to you."

Toyota loses money on every Prius it sells-a situation that won't improve anytime soon. "We expect to see it become profitable in the future, but I wouldn't say near-term," says Dave Illingworth, Toyota's senior vice president of planning and product development. It's unlikely that Honda will fare much better.

For now, manufacturers are forced to eat the cost of these new technologies-and to hope the market catches on quickly.

F

irst, let's establish what a fuel cell is: Remember in chemistry class when you split water with electricity to make water and hydrogen? A fuel cell does the reverse: It combines hydrogen with oxygen in a reaction that produces electricity and water. The acknowledged leader in fuel-cell technology is DaimlerChrysler, which has been working with Ballard Power

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Systems near Vancouver since 1989; it bought a 20 percent stake in Ballard in 1997 (soon after, Ford bought 15 percent). In 1994, the then Daimler-Benz showed its first fuel-cell prototype, the Necar. "It was bigger than a minivan, comparable with a Ford Excursion," says Chris Borroni-Bird, DaimlerChrysler's senior manager of technology strategy planning. "Now Necar 4 [a tiny Mercedes A-Class] is perfectly drivable and has room for four passengers."

Fuel cells are enormously expensive. Ballard has powered a few demo public buses with them that sell for roughly $1.2 million, vs. $250,000 for a typical diesel-powered bus. Ford's first drivable fuel-cell prototype, the hydrogen-powered P2000 HFC, has more than $5 million worth of technology stuffed under the skin of a plain white Contour. "Somebody will probably swallow the incremental costs of producing fuel cells, just like Toyota and Honda are doing for hybrids," says Robertson of DaimlerChrysler. "We'd like to do that, but it's conceivable that we'll do it somewhere other than in the U.S." DaimlerChrysler has said it will offer a fuel cell in 2004. With Ford, Honda, GM and Toyota pushing ahead too, the race is on. In fact, DaimlerChrysler and Ford will begin putting test fuel-cell vehicles on California roads this year.

T

he likely disappearance of the internal combustion engine is leading designers to rethink the aesthetics of the automobile altogether. A good example is the teardrop shape of GM's EVl. Reducing the mass at the front of the vehicle (no more gas engine) cuts friction from wind and enables the car to run more efficiently. "We need to g~t mass out of vehicles," says GM's Larry Burns. "Once we lighten up car bodies and engines, we need fewer suspension parts, smaller brakes." Aluminum, super-lightweight composite materials and high-density plastics-all of which are crash-worthy-are making their way from Formula 1 racing into everyday vehicles.

Interior designs are likely to change too. "A fuel cell essentially has no moving parts, so it allows us to create an aesthetic that is driven by the communications/computer age," says Ford's chief designer, J. Mays. "It's more architectural, less amorphous, more translucent, less saturated in color, so you head toward silver or white. The more color you take out of something, the more it feels modern to people-like in Kubrick's 2001, where everything is white in the spaceship." Indeed, his notion is visible in a prototype from another company, the Audi AL2, which is awash in translucent accents and vapory colors.

The question, then, is no longer, Will we ever be driving nongas-powered cars? The question is, When will we start? The answer will depend on where you live. So sit back and wait: Someday you'll be flying by your envious neighbors in a zero-to60-in-five-seconds fuel cell. And given that this is America, it probably will be a big-and superclean-sport utility.

0

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After decades of the ubiquitous Ambassador, Indians want variety. And U.S. carmakers are eager to give them what they want.

merica's romance with the car rolled the country through a century of prosperity and took American car and auto technologies around the world. Cheap gasoline and excellent highways made America mobile and made the giants of Detroit America's largest industries.

Though America did not invent the car, it soon dominated the industry worldwide.

Innovators like Henry Ford developed the first assembly line car production system in 1903 and in 1908 his famous Model T became the first affordable car for millions.

Few are aware that American cars also had a great impact on India and that an enterprising American had introduced India's first fleet of 50 taxis in Bombay way back in 1903. Before World War II, cars had mainly been the playthings of the Maharajas who prefelTed the elegant vehicles of Britain and Europe to the practical cars of America.

India's first car assembly plant was, however, set up by General Motors in Bombay in 1943. It initially produced cars for the war effort and their big Chevrolets were to soon become the best known cars of the time. Ford followed soon after but

A

both found India's new industrial policies unacceptable and closed shop in 1949. In the 1950s Premier Automobiles produced Dodge cars and trucks for a few years.

The next 25 years till 1984 were a Dark Age for the Indian car and Hindustan Motors, Premier Automobiles, Standard Motors and Kaiser Corporation produced boring and unreliable Indian versions of the MOlTis, Fiat and Standard cars and Willys Jeeps. The government, inspired by visions of Gandhian simplicity and socialist egalitarianism, considered the car a plaything of the elite, crippled it with restrictions and taxes and deprived the country of an industry now recognized as one of the greatest engines for economic and employment growth.

Popular Hollywood films, however, enabled the American car to remain objects of desire for all young Indians through these dark times. They followed with envy the antics of dashing actors and stunning actresses with their flashy Mustangs and Corvettes as well as many elegant limousines and more plebeian cars and trucks. A few extravaganzas like Elvis Presley's pink Cadillac, bank robbery car chases, racing events and some spectacular stunts and crashes kept the American dream alive and well.

During these years America, however, remained one of the major sources of engineering and auto technologies and many U.S. companies went into joint ventures with Indian companies to produce a wide range of automotive components The Ford Ikon, a new competitor touted as "the josh machine" in ads, combines luxury sport with latest safety convenience features.

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like shock absorbers, gaskets, pistons, brake systems, tires, etc. Goodyear set up India's first tire plant at Calcutta in 1920.

Firestone followed a few years later.

Tractors from International Harvester and Ford also made their marks.

In the early 1980s things began to change. Sanjay Gandhi loved cars and spurred the dream of a people's car for India. Japanese vehicles then stormed the market. Suzuki revolutionized Indjan cars with their little Maruti 800 that was India's first modern car. It set new standards of convenience, reliability and fuel economy. Motorcycles from Honda,Suzuki, Yamaha and Kawasaki then stin-ed the two-wheeler market and light trucks from Nissan, Toyota and Mitsubishi reshaped the light transport sector.

Suzuki's partnership with the Maruti, a public sector company, also resulted in customer credit becoming available for the first time from nationalized banks and several credit agencies. American banks like Citibank and Bank of America soon took the lead and defined procedures that the industry was to follow. This belated hire/purchase facility contributed to a large expansion of market potential as Indian buyers could for the first time buy against their future incomes instead of having to rely on their meager savings alone.

The market began to stir and many U.S., European and Japanese companies began studying India's market potential.

A study team from Ford concluded that the overtaxed Indian citizen was a poor customer without access to any bank or private finance. They concluded that, as government or companies bought most new cars, there was no market for small cars but some potential for big ones.

The reform process that began in 1991 soon saw an invasion of potential investors from almost every automaker seriously examining the Indian market.

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The annual car sales of less than 180,000 units in 1990 seemed much less than what a big country like India was capable of absorbing. Automakers had seen how the markets of Southeast Asia and South America had taken off and many wanted to get an early toehold into this huge, undeveloped market. Many teams from Daewoo, BMW, Chrysler, GM, Honda, Hyundai, Fiat, Ford, Mercedes-Benz, Peugeot, Renault, Toyota, Volkswagen and Volvo scoured the market, researched the potential, talked to prospective partners and made their plans.

They also studied the problems of gov-

grow by 8.3 million units between now and 2006. Virtually all of that growth will occur outside North America and Europe ...and most of it will occur in the Asia Pacific region. We must establish a strong presence in Asian markets like India, Thailand, Vietnam and China."

Most of these were large cars by Indian standards even if they were considered as just compacts in their home countries. The new projects generated huge consumer enthusiasm that was aided by enhanced financial services and credit. Sales soared to over 400,000 units in 1997.

In 1998, the elegant and peppy Honda The Escort, another Ford entry, has done well in the U.S. and Europe. One selling point: it is environment friendly, with recyclahle parts. CFC-free air conditioning and improved emissions standards.

ernment policy with too many bureaucratic controls at the center, state and local areas and too few infrastructures of power, roads and ports. A few scoffed and declared that India was just a land of promises, promises and still more promises. But they were all impressed by the existence of a mature steel and auto ancillary industry. Even more impressive were the huge resources of well-educated engineers and managers who had a command of English and the millions of skilled industrial workers. Many automakers had earlier studied the Chinese market and preferred the prospect of projects in India in a better social and legal climate. Many went ahead with serious plans for manufacturing projects in partnership with leading Indian industrialists.

In 1995 a number of new cars began to roll out from new assembly plants set up

by Daewoo, Peugeot and Mercedes-Benz.

In 1996, the Ford Escort, Opel Astra and Fiat Uno joined the fray. The general view was reflected by Ford CEO Jac Nasser: "The global auto industry is expected to

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City and Mitsubishi Lancer cars took the lead among the larger cars but toward the end of the year, a pack of smaller cars like the Hyundai Santro, Daewoo Matiz and the Indian-designed Tata Indica entered the market at very competitive prices. These offered better space, comfort and performance than the pint-sized Maruti 800 and collectively overtook it propelling the 1999 sales to close to 600,000 units.

Toward the end of 1999, another pack of well priced subcompacts like the Ford Ikon and Opel Corsa along with the Fiat Siena arrived, set to redefine India's prestige car segment. They are comfortable and spacious on the inside but a little smaller outside than cars like the Astra, City, Escort and Lancer. With many price options they bridge the price gaps between small and larger cars. If the compact car segment expands, we may soon see some even larger cars like the Opel Vectra, Opel Zafira, Skoda Octavia, Daewoo Laganza, Hyundai Sonata and Honda Accord before the year is out. We may also see some multipurpose vehicles

like the Ford Scorpio.

Highlighting General Motors plans for the Asian region, Rick Wagoner, president and chief operating officer of the corporation said, "India has been identified as one of the key growth markets in the region by our company and launch of the 'millennium car' Corsa, the second offering from GM India, is the manifestation of the importance GM attaches to the Indian operations. The launch of the new Astra and the Opel Corsa will help us further consolidate the Indian operations."

Wagoner was in India recently to unveil the Corsa.

The industry anticipates that the Indian market should achieve a sale of about 800,000 cars. in the year 2000 and perhaps a million the year after. This will make India one of the world's major car markets.

Today there are nearly 40 different models of cars with many more variants with numerous engine and accessory options.

Many consumers complain that there is now too much choice but thank God there is choice at last. And, all the cars are now good, reliable, safe, environment friendly and good value. Competition has done more for the industry than all the regulations of the past decades.

The nationalities of modem cars are also getting blurred because the globalization of the car companies results in components and technologies coming from many different parts of the world. The huge American gas guzzlers have a limited appeal in the rest of the world so the technology centers of the smaller Ford and GM cars are no longer in the U.S. but in Europe. Ford has nearly 7,000 technicians and scientists devoted to designing cars at their technical centers in u.K. and Germany while GM has an equal number at their German centers.

Many of the smaller GM engines are sourced from Holden in Australia while components for all the plants come from many different countries.

Ford did not correctly evaluate the Indian market when they set up an assembly plant in a joint venture with the Mahindra group in 1995. They chose a 1300 cc engine for their Escort entry model. Though it was a good and reliable car, many buyers thought a 1500 cc Daewoo Cielo or a 1600 cc Opel

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Astra would be a better buy. Though sales languished Ford decided to boldly soldier on and set up a huge new manufacturing unit capable of high indigenization near Chennai for which they decided to invest $800 million.

This time they thoroughly researched the market and created a brand new car that Ford intended to introduce to tough markets like India, South Africa and South America. The new Ford Ikon had been derived from the well-known Fiesta platform but had the successful "edge design" that had made the Ford Focus such a success in Europe. Though a bit smaller than the Escort, the platform had been stretched to provide more rear seat legroom so necessary for a family car. Knowing that the Indian market was also very price sensitive, they passed on the benefits of a high 70 percent local content to give consumers a very competitive price.

General Motors, who had been a bit more successful with their Opel Astra also found that they were losing ground to more powerful cars from Honda and Mitsubishi.

They also recognized that there was a need for a slightly smaller and more affordable prestige car and began studying the possibilities of introducing variants of their successful Corsa. A stylish new Corsa was developed as a family sedan with a proper boot. President and Managing Director of General Motors India, R.C. Swando, adds: "With changing social equations and

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increase in the upper middle class segment, Indian automobile market holds great promise in the new millennium. We at General Motors are confident that with consistent emphasis on delivering quality products such as the Opel Astra and Corsa with focus on total customer satisfaction, our company would be successful and emerge as a trend setter in both the segments."

While most auto companies began as joint ventures, most of the Indian partners were unwilling to provide funds for the heavy investments needed by the auto industry especially as many would not be profitable for many years. Most of them sold their stakes to their partners. Ford bought out the stake of Mahindra's and GM bought out the stake of c.K. Birla to become 100 percent subsidiaries of their parent companies.

AIl the new auto companies had to face the problem of India's love of low priced cars. Modem cars cannot be cheap because their manufacturing costs also carry the burden of expensive technologies for safety and low pollution. Most Indian buyers would agree with Henry Ford who had once said: "Safety does not sell." Safety was, however, a major concern among all international auto companies and they could not make exceptions for any country. Their global reputations were much too valuable.

There were sin1ilar concerns in the area of pollution. Both Ford and GM introduced much more expensive MPFI fuel injection

systems that, with electronic engine management, made their cars better but more expensive. Fortunately, concerns about the rising pollution resulted in public interest litigations and the courts cracked down on the government, who in turn made all car companies conform to Euro-II emission standards from April 2000. Environment had now become a consumer issue and most auto companies initiated steps to conform well before the deadline.

The huge Auto Expo 2000 exhibition held in New Dell1i recently actually set a (Col1finued on page 58)

.General Motors checks in with the Opel Astra (above) and the Opel Corsa (below).

Safety, convenience, comfort tailored to India with features such as higher ground clearance, reinforced suspension and gas-charged shock absorbers.

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ransnationa

awan

Two Expert Opinions Increasingly we see companies jumping over national legal barriers and stepping into the globa the Nasdaq as businesses find membership in that regulated club a key to.global success. What an

Russell Pittma n Monopoly is not just a parlor game in the U.S. Monopolies provoke serious repercussions under U.S. antitrust laws.

Some analysts see parallels in the current U.S. vs.

Microsoft litigation to the bitter battles against the oil and railway companies at the turn of the last century.

Russell Pittman is a lawyer and economist. Although he couldn't talk about the Microsoft case because it is sub judice and he represents the U.S. Department of Justice as director of Economic Research and International Technical Assistance, Economic Analysis Group, Antitrust division, he did make some observations about the internationalization of competition law during a recent visit to India.

Please define competition law. How is it important in free market economies?

Well, I'd say competition law is basically a law to make sure that the liberalized free market economy achieves all of the benefits that it should in businesses, and make sure that those benefits are shared. It's basically designed to prevent

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various business actions that would harm the free market process, whether those business actions are by multinationals or by local companies of India or foreign direct inv'estors or whoever. The law in most countries-and I expect India's will as well-addresses all of those kinds of behavior that have an impact on India, on its

businesses, on its consumers, on its population. And the three kinds of behavior that are basically considered by competition law are: agreements among enterprises, especially cartel agreements, which may result in price fixing in sales or bid-rigging to government purchasers; mergers and acquisitions and combinations among enterprises which may reduce competition in particular markets; and the abuse of a dominant position in the market-where an enterprise that has 50 or 75 percent share in the market may take actions not to make a better product or sell a product to more people at a better price, but to harm the ability of other competitors to get access to the market.

How are such violations handled under competition law?

Certainly we do seek to prosecute abusive behavior by dominant enterprises. And whenever you have an economy that has been very protected, you are likely to have businesses that are either engaged in caJtel behavior or are in a dominant position and are able to take abusive action to prevent the development of competition. Indeed, one of the things one fears in a country like India that is going through foreign trade

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(onomlC rowt marketplace. The queue is getting longer for admittance to the New York Stock Exchange and the implications for the future? Are international laws moving toward uniformity?

liberalization is that foreign exporters or Indian importers will get new products into the country, but there is always the possibility that a domestic dominant fIrm will take action to keep those products out of the market, for example, by tying up distribution channels. If I have 75 percent of the Indian market in product X and I sign exclusive deals with all of my distributors that they won't distribute anybody else's product X, that may be very effective at keeping imports of product X out of the Indian market and protecting my dominant position. Now to be sure, there also may be abuses of dominance by multinationals who are bringing products into India. And certainly I have heard that concern expressed a lot by Indian manufacturers and people in enterprises. And the law will apply to that as well. If all those guys are doing is selling a good product at a fair price, fine. That's competition. That's what it should be. But if they come in and take some kind of abusive actions that prevent other people from competing on a levelplaying field, then the law will apply to them as well.

But the Internet is changing all the rules, isn't it? How do you see the Internet affect-

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ing growth and regulation of competition?

There are a couple of different ways that the Internet affects competition. Number one, competition is generally localized, in the sense that if you are a builder in Delhi and you want to buy cement, you buy cement usually from someone very close tei you, because many products like cement, like steel, cost a lot to transport. Some of those can go very far. But in general, especially the semi-bulk commodities like cement, are not going to go too far. So the ability of a producer to get his product to a consumer cheaply is a very important detelminant of how much competition you get. In fact, that's one reason Indian markets have lacked competition. It's because the roads and the railway systems are so inefficient. It costs such a horrendous amount to get that product shipped by railroad or by truck to another state, it may be easier to import. Even if merely on the price of a product, the local consumer can benefit.

That I think is going to be one of the main benefits ofliberalization, as enterprises like the electricity, telecom, railroad are liberalized, they should provide better services to Indian producers, get them more sales, get increased competition in the market regardless of what competition law lays

down. And that will bring prices down, because it will create more competition.

The Internet does that for some products.

For instance, I can walk around Washington and look at bookshops to see what they are selling this book for, but I can also just go on the Internet to see what Amazon and Barnes and Nobel and the other guys are selling it for. And so for consumer products that are easy to get, the Internet provides a lot more competition. And the same is true for producer products. If a producer needs books or small components of some kind, he no longer has to depend on the local manufacturers represented in his town, he can go on the Internet and see who's providing them and how fast they can get them and so forth.

So I think the Internet helps in many markets. It doesn't help the cement manufacturer very much, but in many markets the Internet broadens that geographic market and provides more competition and gets the customer a better product and better prices just because there is more competition.

You are an economist. How do you see the Indian economy right now after nearly a decade of liberalization?

I think there is a lot to be optimistic about. I mean, clearly, reforms started in

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1991 and we are in 2000. That's a long time to really reform areas that need serious reform. But at the same time, tariff levels are down. I think they average in the low 30s now, low 30 percent. That's pretty high, but there seems to be a real commitment, partly connected to the WTO, to have them down to 15 percent within a couple of years. And that's a big change. That creates a lot of competition, to continue to cut tariff rates, to cut them basically in half to what they are now. That's going to provide a real jolt to competition and it's going to be very good for Indian purchasers of products, whether they are businesses or consumers. I think the advent of the new competition law in India to replace the old MRTP will be very good for the Indian economy, because the old MRTP was very restrictive, very bureaucratic.

And I have met with S.V.S Raghavan, who is the very distinguished chairman of the committee that is writing the new competition law, and if there is one thing he is committed to it's not breeding another bureaucracy that businesses have to go through for months and months to get something done. So I think the new competition law will be simple and efficient and will certainly help competition in that regard as well.

I know that in many sectors-telecommunications, electricity, coal-there has not been a lot of private sector activity yet.

But as I understand it, the restrictions to private sector activity have been mostly removed, so that there is a real potential that those sectors will become more efficient as the old state companies either are disinvested and become private, or-I guess and/or-get competition from these private companies. I think there is every reason to believe that the infrastructure sectors will become more efficient. As I described earlier, the electricity, the telecoms, the railroads, will certainly help, especially the interior of the country-the landlocked states. It will help enterprises in those states become more efficient and certainly help the economy. As I understand it, some of the tax disadvantages to interstate shipments have already been removed and there is every reason to hope

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Our biggest problem with implementation of competition law is getting an ethic of competition in the people. And getting people to accept that every problem isn't solved by the government.

protect those people who are in the protected sectors, keep them from being thrown out in the streets and starving, you can make dramatic changes in the overall welfare of the economy.

Some economists see the problems of India as problems of distribution, saying there is an abundance of resources and there is no good reason that 40 percent of the population live in poverty. How do you solve problems like that?

Well, I go back to the great Indian economist Amartya Sen, who says: you give people jobs. You find ways to give people jobs so that they can afford to feed that there will be further movement away their families. Certainly there are other from restrictions on interstate shipments which are certainly a real drag on compe- . policies that have impact, like the kinds of policies that I mentioned, which I hope tition and economic growth. will dramatically lower transportation So I don't want to be a Dr. Pangloss and costs, for example. You can get food to say everything in every way is getting better and better, but it seems to me there is markets where it's expensive to get it to great reason to be optimistic. There is a lot now. But I think the main thing to do is happening in India right now, and over the make sure there are jobs, even low-paying jobs. There are plenty of productive next few years a lot will be liberalized.

Certainly, as in every liberalization of things to do in India right now. Hire more economy there are people who get hurt. elementary school teachers. Hire more And that's something to be very conlocal health-care workers. Give these they can cerned about and I don't minimize that for people money-salaries-that a minute. The state or the center need to use to buy food for their families. I know progress is being made in this but my unhave policies to protect those who lose derstanding is that there is a long way to their jobs through competition: for rego. And providing jobs for the people is training, for investment by small busithe essential way to do it. nesses and so forth. I think it is absolutely essential that the people who have beneYou work in a very special area, transifited from protection, as that protection leaves, must be protected from being tions. What is the toughest transition in thrown out on the streets. But it's abemerging economies?

I have to think about that. Certainly the solutely important that economic protection leaves, because the benefits to the jolt of freeing up controlled prices is a big jolt, and from my work in Eastern entire society are so broad.

Europe and the former Soviet Union, Once you start protecting businessesand this is true whether in India or in the there are a lot of benefits to liberalization in removing those controls, but certainly United States-once you start saying, O.K., this business is not really efficient it's a jolt to the population when either many of the products or at least a few baanymore, but look at all these families that sic products have been under government are going to be hurt, look at all these guys who are going to be thrown out of work, controls for generations and suddenly so let's protect it....Then you do the same there is a free market. By golly, a lot of those prices go up a lot. And sometimes for this one and that one, pretty soon you have an economy full of inefficient operawages, even as the economy progresses, take their time rising as much as those tions with people doing inefficient work and they're not producing the goods that prices did. So maybe that's the biggest the Indian consumer needs. If you can jolt, that as you have liberalization it

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seems that prices move up a lot faster than wages do, and you have a big chunk of the population that suddenly-maybe temporarily-but suddenly find their living standards fall. And they say, well great, is that what transition is all about?

Is that what the free market is? I can't afford to go out to a restaurant anymore?

So I think that gets back to the importance of jobs and a safety net to protect the poor. I think that may be the greatest difficulty in a transition.

Now, countries do get over that. I was in Poland when that happened, and it was a huge shock. But now Poland is a great success story. The private sector is just thriving there, people have jobs; even the poor, the pensioners and so forth are able to eat.

It's not a matter of losing their standard of living completely. So you get over it, if the economy is opened up and free and new jobs can be created. It's a tough time when prices are liberalized, and I think there are some arguments for doing it gradually.

Are there any parallels in U.S. history of this sort of thing happening? Deregulation,for instance?

I think deregulation would be the closest. We've never had anything like that in kind or in degree because our economy has never been so controlled. There were controls during World War II for example, but everyone knew it was only temporary.

Certainly the deregulation of the infrastructure sectors in the United States which started in the late 1960s, early '70s had a big impact on those sectors. And a lot of businesses found their lives very much easier because they could get competitive quotes from railroads and they could get competitive long distance provision, and now they can start getting competitive suppliers of electricity and natural gas. But it was a big jolt for those sectors. The railroad sector is one I am very familiar with, and as that sector was being deregulated, very quickly the guys who had been the executives in the old regime found that this was not an environment for them. They were used to dealing with regulators and congressmen, they weren't used to dealing with the free market. So one by one those companies found new executives, because

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In all major countries you

will have firms opting for a globalized strategy. But in many cases they will distance themselves from other geographical regions within their own countries.

it was a whole new world, and the old skills weren't useful in the new world.

Are there any words of comfort or advice that can be offered for getting over the hump?

Our biggest problem with implementing competition law is getting an ethic of competition in the people. And getting people to accept the fact that every problem isn't solved by the government, that, in fact, the market takes care of some things. And of course, there is a place for the government. Absolutely, there is a place for the government, but there are many things, especially in the economic realm, that the government isn't very good at doing. You have to think of the imperfections of government as well. And if anyone in the world knows how slow and inefficient a bureaucratic government can be, I think Indians do, and I think they will be very surprised and pleased at how much better a mostly deregulated, nonbureaucratized economy can work.

One of the problems with privatization, disinvestment, liberalization and so forth is that you can always identify the victims, but the beneficiaries are all over the subcontinent. If you do something that opens up competition in some food product, maybe you are only helping everybody in India by a dollar, but with a thousand million people, that's still a lot of money. Those people, it's good for them, but the ones who are hurt by it are the ones who are hurt a lot, and there is a tendency again, not just in India but in the U.S. as well, to hear those people who are hurt and not think about the whole broad public who is going to be

Insurance is something people don't understand very well, but it is poised to enter India. How important is the insurance sector infree market economies?

I think insurance has many unique aspects and they are treated in special ways in most countries, including the U.S. But what's not different about insurance is that competition is pretty beneficial. An insurer who's a monopolist does not have the pressure to sell his policies to people at the best rates and to provide new policies to cover people's different needs. He's sitting there and people are going to buy his insurance no matter what it looks like. So if he wants to make money, he needs to have a good enough policy so people will buy it, but he doesn't have to make the best policy because he has no competition. But once there is competition, then you have people creating new kinds of policies that will meet the needs of different people and competing on the rates they charge. Then you will get new kinds of customers.

Now insurance is one sector where you do need some regulation to make sure that people are not selling a product at such a low rate that they won't be able to pay their claims. Or that they're going to sell a thousand policies or a hundred thousand policies, take the money and vanish, and the people won't be protected. So you do need some kind of solvency regulation, as with banks, to make sure the people's money is protected.

You can have competition and still have some regulatory protection against destructive competition that would result in people losing their money to the bank or insurance company.

Insurance is a very good sector and it's very competitive. Some parts of the sector have more giant firms dominating than others. You have health insurance, life insurance, auto insurance and all that. You have a variety of providers. Most customers can get a variety of quotes and bids on different rates. Mostly it's regulated at the state level, not the national level. In general, there are a lot of insurance companies, large and small, and the competition they provide is very beneficial.

D

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Thomas Heller Thomas Heller is a professor of international law at Stanford University and a senior fellow at the Stanford Institute of International Studies. His interest lies not only in the law that governs multinational investment, but in the environment, as a consultant on the Clean Development Mechanism to forestall the global warming that is rapidly changing the climate of our planet.

While in India, he shared some thoughts with SPAN. There is a lot of talk lately about convergence and transnational law. Is the new millennium going to be an age of an international legal code?

I've been asking myself that question.

When people talk about convergence, they are often refening to advanced industrial countries. When they speak about developing countries, it is more about the role of law. Another question I have is: what is the relation between the convergence hypothesis as discussed in advanced industrial countries and the growing role of law hypothesis, in that they are one and the same thing? It's a little hard to know. I look at the First World countries like Germany, Japan and the United States.

Assuming that if we are going to see convergence in advanced industrial countries, those are places where we will see it.

There seems to be more convergence in the areas of corporate governance and finance infrastructure than in other fields, more than in competition law. In developing countries the convergence is happening more tlu'ough indirect methods. So, for example, I saw in the paper this morning that a bunch of Indian companies are taking steps to get listing on the Nasdaq. So what, in effect, they are doing is shifting to another legal system, for a large part, and its mode of regulation.

Why is this happening? It's not just happening with startups, it's happening with

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very large global companies like DaimlerBenz and Toyota, who are restructuring themselves for the New York Stock Exchange. And what strikes me is that they are subjecting themselves to U.S. law, voluntarily-and in many cases it is enormously expensive. Daimler-Benz had to restructure their accounting practices, costing themselves tens of millions of dollars.

The Daimler-Benz management had been reporting themselves as profitable under German law for a number of years. Under U.S. law they showed several years where they were in the red because of differences in the way we report things-not allowing slush funds in one year to make up losses carried over from one year in another year, for instance. So you ask, what's going on?

It seems to be mostly about trying to get access to global capital markets, and to do so they, in effect, have to certify themselves as a company that has certain types of internal practices, certain types of governance. You do that by coming onto the New York Stock Exchange or the Nasdaq, subjecting yourself to the required practices and voluntarily see to your internal governance to certify to potential shareholders in public markets that this is a company that is transparent; that this is a company where you've got outside monitors, independent directors; that this is a company where public shareholders are going to have certain types of protection because

they can use U.S. securities laws now to go after managerial, controlling shareholders when it is in their interest.

So a lot of the convergence we are seeing begins in tighter action, moving among legal systems, rather than lobbying or doing whatever to change the law of the country. And it's this mobility, this capacity to move among systems, that is changing practices and may ultimately force changes in the local law as different nation states feel compelled to adjust their legal system to facilitate in some way what may be going on anyway.

In Fran<;e, Germany or Greece it doesn't matter so much what their national law says, because companies can move freely within Europe. As long as they have met the law of the country where they are operating, their products or services have to be accepted in all the countries of the European Union. So again it's mobility and increasing capacity for mobility that seems to be the dominant factor, rather than lobbying to change the laws of a country. Maybe after a while countries will give up, and say, well, we are not going to try to maintain these differential laws because they are hurting us in some way, and we can't stop the invocation of other systems anyway. So where mobility is maximized, this convergence seems to be moving faster.

This happens even with regard to competition law. It may be that a country has certain policies with regard to internal market structures, but the fact is if they are open to flows of capital and flows o~ goods, then consumers are going to get the same results that a strongly enforced competition law would provide anyway, because prices are going to be driven down to a global level and quality of competition will occur. So one of the hard things about viewing this convergence is figuring out what to look at. I think many people who argue that convergence is not happening may be looking in the wrong places. They are looking at specific laws of a country. In fact, it's the penetration of increasingly open economies that is producing a shift in

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practices and a shift in policies that is fair1ynoticeable, at least in advanced industrialized countries. When you come to developing countries, there again the same forces are operating. The biggest difference that I find, at least now, is the fact that the service sectors in these countries, whether you are talking about accounting or management consulting, Internet services, distribution, whatever, they are not undergoing the same kind of rapid opening that is certainly in the United States and to a lesser degree in Europe and Japan.

On the whole, fim1s are more and more faced with questions of whether they are going to adopt strategies where they are going to compete in the international markets, product markets and capital markets, or whether they are going to continue to adapt themselves to operating in a relatively closed environment and try to gain a larger share of that market through the exercise of political influence and relationships. My own sense is that in all major countries, including the major developing countries, you will have firms opting for a globalized strategy. And I think that one of the consequences of that is going to be that we will see certain finns and certain geographical complexes, like Bangalore, that kind of rush forward into this new international world. But in many cases they will distance themselves more and more from other geographical regions within their own countries. Instead of saying India is a developing country in 20 years, you may say there are important, even mega-complexes in India that are very much integrated into this global economy and other parts of the system that have retained their allegiances to all fonns of institutions, where they feel increasingly disconnected. And that certainly is a source of tension. That tension we have already seen in the United States with the bifurcation of growth in areas, among people, where whole areas of the timer city are left further and further behind while the rest of this economy rushes ahead with people who have committed themselves to a different way of structure.

Recent years have increasingly seen big business moving toward more environmentally sound practices. The Clean

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Development Mechanism, on which you are a consultant, proposes measures to involve nations and businesses in implementing better practices. How is this progressing?

An organization was set up by scientists, mostly physical scientists, at the time of the ozone hole problem: the InterGovernmental Panel on Climate Change Now. It was very influential in trying to establish the science that led to the Montreal Protocol and the treaties dealing with ozone-depleting substances. And those treaties were basically to finish in their fundamental form in 1987, which was just about the time that people were beginning to notice indicators in the rate of temperature change.

People have known about the Greenhouse Effect and the possibilities of climate change through industrial action and releases for hundreds of years.

This has been discussed in the scientific literature as an interesting possibility. But in the late 1980s-partly because people focused on the atmosphere when the Montreal Protocol pushed attention that way-it became apparent that there were more rapid changes than expected. As a result of this, this scientific body transposed its expertise and began to focus on climate change issues. Eventually it was absorbed into the U system and became a semi-official. It is especially focused in technology transfer, and they are preparing assessment report due in 2001 to help governments understand their options, and to inform the rising debate in which India has been one of the promoters and principal motivators regarding the longer run responsibilities of countries.

There are questions of equity and sustainable development that ultimately have to be resolved for this regime to continue evolving to the level where it is capable of dealing with a problem of this magnitude.

The Kyoto Protocol is a barest start on what eventually will have to be done. I think everyone understands that as countries become better economically developed, many countries that now do not have any kind of affirmative responsibility for limiting their obligations will have

to become engaged fashion.

with that 111some

India has an increasing presence on the world economic playing field, but it is grappling with many internal challenges, both economic and environmental. What is the solution?

We find ourselves in a situation where the economic disparities in the world have become so great that it's pretty hard to imagine important countries like India or China not aspiring to a substantial improvement in the life of a large percentage of their population. So economic development becomes kind of a threshold condition. And everything else comes on top of it. And I guess there are lost anthropological utopias that somehow get shunted aside in this and no one really considers if village life is preferable, but it just doesn't seem to be in the cards right now. So the big questions become: how do you somehow harness the force of economic growth in ways that steer it so that you have the best possibilities of social justice and sustainable development? That's not an easy trick.

In the First World, of course, we went through periods in which we had enormous injustice and incredible pollution, like that we are looking at out this window. In Pittsburgh in the 1950s, in Birmingham in the 1920s were horrendous. The way you get it clean, and the way you get more justice, is to grow.

And that raises the obvious questions about whether the world can sustain growth at those levels.

From my standpoint, there is not that much choice. It's not that you can really turn your back on economic development.

I try not to be foolish about the possibilities of technology. So far, thank god, we continue to manage to expand the productivity we get out of natural resources, and services and other sorts of things seem to be capable of producing another large jump in the economic well-being of people. My own sense is that probably the best we can do is to try and channel that growth in ways that it does as little damage as possible to our social fabric and our physical assets.

0

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benchmark. All auto companies wanted to showcase their products in the best light and had to show that they met the highest standards of safety and environment protection, in addition to all the many other design and technical features. More than a million eager visitors attended this show where almost every auto company displayed their wares and plans .. for the future.

Though intensely competitive, both Ford and Opel followed somewhat similar strategies. They both decided that the Indian market needed special engines and developed robust new 8-valve engines that delivered a high power output at low engine speeds as are needed in frequently slow Indian traffic. Though 16-valve engines are great for high-speed performance, the newly developed engines can match them in power while being cheaper to make and easier to service. Both companies spent many million miles of testing to refine their engines, body shells, suspensions and steering to handle India's rather unpredictable roads.

The development of major projects by Ford and General Motors needed the support of many of their dedicated vendors.

Visteon and Delphi were two big subsidiary companies of Ford and GM who manufactured the electric, electronic, engine cooling, air-conditioning, brakes, clutches, lights, horns, instruments, dashboard assemblies, bumpers and many other systems. An important area was the electronic engine management and MPFI fuel injection systems with sequential injection for efficient power delivery and low pollution.

They and some others were described as tier-I suppliers who would make a complete subassembly containing dozens of subcomponents that could be quickly and efficiently snapped into place without holding up the complete assembly line.

One assembly like the dashboard might contain 50 instruments, switches and other parts. Companies like the Lear Corporation would make complete seats including the safety belts, head rests, seat sliding and tilting mechanisms, etc.

To make the many systems they went into a number of joint ventures with other

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Indian component manufacturers or became a buyer for their parts that were integrated into the complete systems supplied to the auto companies. They not only supplied systems to their parent companies but to avoid unnecessary duplication of expensive investments even supplied components to their competitors. Initially the engines are being imported but their indigenization would require a similar development of suppliers for their castings, forgings and components.

As the volumes increase, the automakers will want to shift from assembly plants to full manufacturing plants despite the fact that the capital costs of the change are very high. There is, however, a great temptation because the substitution of imports carrying high customs duties results in very large savings in marlUfacturing costs leading to better market penetration or profit opportunities.

A manufacturing plant, unlike an assembly plant, will have press shops to make the sheet metal body panels and a machine shop to make the engines and gearboxes and their many components.

The bodies will be welded together in body shops with a number of welding stations from where the "body-in-white" will go to a sophisticated paint shop in both manufacturing and assembly plants. Then they will go to an assembly line where the bodies will be fitted with engines, gearboxes, suspensions, tires, steering assemblies, starters, generators, seats, dashboards, lights and hundreds of components before going for inspection and delivery. Many American companies produce the machine tools for the plants while many consulting companies provide sophisticated systems for manufacture and management and many U.S. compa-

nies are involved with the machines for making steel sheets, castings and forgings as well as for machining the gears, shafts, housings and other parts.

India's auto policy, encouraging import substitution and export-linked imports, also opens many opportunities of marketing to other countries. The labor costs in developed countries are high, especially in slightly hazardous and polluting industries like castings and forgings and the costs of local parts are often very attractive. While the export of fully built cars is desirable, freight costs often limit the range of opportunities making exports outside neighboring countries difficult. It is often much easier to export components back to their parent companies.

Marketing and distribution is also vital for success and every company introduces its own systems honed from the experience in many countries. Interestingly, both Ford and GM prefer bright entrepreneurs without auto experience for their new dealerships to some of the old auto dealers who bring the baggage of old habits with them.

The modem dealer workshop does not have mechanics with scruffy overalls but yo!!ng engineers who subject the cars to computerized engine and suspension analyzers with the appearance and attitudes of a surgeon in an operating theater.

Advertising and sales promotion are also crucial for marketing success and as American advertising agencies like J. Walter Thompson, McAnn Ericson, Gray, OBM, BBDO and others are big players in Indian advertising, they too bring their American experience of automobile advertising to the Indian marketplace.

The car may have suffered in the past being viewed as a toy of the elite, but there is now a realization of the automobile as an economic growth. Today the auto industry already accounts for over 5 percent of India's GNP but may rise to 12 percent as in many countries. So, as the Indian automobile finally comes into its own, many American companies are becoming a part of this rapidly evolving industry.

0 About the Author: Murad Ali Baig is a management consultant and one of India's well known motoring analysts.

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The Visionary Thing

continued jiom

page3}

It begins with PARC's Computer Science Lab. CSL was a tree full of owls, so PARC created a Systems Science Lab 0 (SSL) to take visionary ideas from CSL and engineer them into products.

0 But of course the good people in SSL prefelTed not to be a conduit for CSL, but to have their own visionary ideas. So in time PARC created an Advanced Development Lab (ADL) to make practical prototypes out of the ideas from CSL and SSL. PARC cleverly put ADL in Los Angeles, 650 kilometers from the visionaries, just so ADL people would not be confused about their charter.

Well, you guessed it. ADL's Angelenos would rather have had their fingernails pulled out one at a time than adopt even a single idea from the arrogant twits up near what they insisted on calling Frisco.

And so Xerox, by then desperate to make something of its investment in PARC, created a Systems Development Division (SDD), in Palo Alto, where I worked starting in 1976. And then-as that wasn't quite working out-an Advanced Systems Division (ASD), also in Palo Alto. Next, Xerox's Office Products Division (OPD) in Dallas was given the job.

came Eckhard Pfeiffer, not a visionary if there ever wasn't one. Compaq is now looking, not for its first visionary, but for someone even tougher than Pfeiffer. I'm pushing Slobodan Milosevic.

Now, to be sure, there are visionaries who don't end up poor and bitter, or at least haven't yet. There are MIT's two Greek visionary computer lab directors, Nicholas Negroponte and Michael Dertouzos-although they have the unfair advantage of leading research toward their visions, and then graduating students who become entrepreneurs in their name. And there's Sky Dayton, who doesn't seem the least bit piqued not to be at his company's helm any longer. Dayton, who founded EarthLink, now a large and growing ISP, brags about not having been admitted to college while envisioning how the Internet should evolve. Despite the failure of her girl-software company, famed to have been flooded with visions, so far Brenda Laurel is still affable. And Alan Kay, one of PARe's most famous visionaries, betrays a bit of I-told-you-so, but he's far from bitter. Paul Saffo, director of the Institute for the Future, is a professional think-tank visionary in his prime. I only worry Saffo will succumb to the classic temptation of frequent speakers (and I'm not exempt): saying things that are not right but cute.

So, despite the term's sketchy track record, plenty of people are still claiming it. But I wouldn't. Not with a lO-foot pole. Of course, as you may have noticed, it's quite a trick to get credit without taking it. So, in my dotage, I've settled on the term pundit-a guru without followers, opining about technology. You probably think that, after all this, I know that you know that I want you to think I'm a visionary anyway. Well, you couldn't be further from or closer to the truth.

D

Gosh, they soy, I hope to be visionory like you ond hove house like yours...

he technology transfer from PARe's CSL visionaries did not make it to market through the bucket brigade of ever more practical, self-effacing and subvisionary people in SSL, ADL, SDD, ASD and OPD. What did happen is that various entrepreneurs, some from within PARe, after a polite period, and some from without, with no politeness at all, stole the visions and made them profitable.

For contrast, consider Compaq, now the world's secondlargest personal computer company. Never had a visionary.

After Jobs at Apple and Don Estridge (R.I.P.) at IBM, Rod Canion founded Compaq to do no more than make money cloning IBM PCs. When that simple idea ran out of runway, in

T

About the Author: Bob Metcalfe, the inventor of Ethernet, founder of 3Com and eponymous hero of Metcalfe's Law, writes a weekly column for InfoWorld.

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