Third Wave requirements

Yesterday, I wrote about the CNMI’s increasing need to adapt to the “Third Wave” of global change and succeed in this new Information Age. To do this, we have to ask ourselves the following question: What are the new requirements of the Information Age, and can the CNMI sufficiently adapt to these new conditions in order to enjoy extended success in the 21st Century? To answer this very salient question, I again looked to the New Economy criteria as set forth in futurists Alvin and Heidi Toffler’s book, War And Anti-War.

According to the Tofflers, the New “Third Wave” Economy urgently demands the following: new factors of production, intangible values, de-massification, constant innovation, new organizations, and rapid and unceasing acceleration, among other related considerations.

The old, Second Wave, industrial factors of production are no longer as tenable. Land, labor, raw materials, and even capital itself are no longer as vital as they once were back in the industrial age. Instead, new Third Wave factors of “data, information, images, symbols, culture, ideology, and values” must take supreme precedence over any outdated notions. The CNMI must be more open, fluid, flexible, and dynamic, infused with creative potential rather than stifled by censorship, inhibitions, or outdated government structures.

In the new business environment, a company’s most precious assets reside, not in its trucks and assembly lines, not in its hard, physical assets, but rather, in its patents and, above all, in the creative minds of its unconstrained, liberated employees. Indeed, the new corporate culture in many of America’s most advanced software and other high-tech corporations no longer conform to the rigid 1950s white collar stereotypes. The unorthodox, toy-filled offices of Microsoft Corporation in Seattle represent a striking case in point. To compete in the new age, we must abandon harsh, rigid, stifled, conformist corporate culture and embrace more intangible values.

The industrial age was the time of mass production, mass media, mass consumption. Henry Ford’s first mass produced automobile, for example, the Model T Ford, only came in one color–black. In the new information age, de-massification is the prevailing way. Mass marketing is declining against a backdrop of micro-markets, customization, and a shift “from homogeneity toward extreme heterogeneity”.

According to the Tofflers, the information age is characterized by constant, incessant, unrelenting, ceaseless innovation and change.
Product lifecycles are shortening every year.
This new reality demands that companies “Throw away the rule book.”

Can the CNMI “throw away the rule book”? Has it thrown away the rule book? Hardly. On the contrary, the CNMI is still highly conservative and recalcitrant, very resistant toward rapid and irrevocable changes. The flat tax and school voucher proposals have apparently been rejected.

The information age also requires new organizations–organizations that are dispersed and decentralized. “Pyramidal, monolithic, and bureaucratic” structures must be dismantled–in both public and private sectors alike. Constant re-engineering and restructuring represent the new order of the New Economy. Yet, we still permit a government bureaucracy (PSS) to sponsor centralized education under heavy handed government direction.

From the old industrial age to the new information age, we have gone from the old “time is money” dictum to “every interval of time is worth more than the one before it.” According to the Tofflers, “Slow, sequential, step-by-step engineering is now replaced by ‘simultaneous engineering.’” Yet, the CNMI has not kept pace. We still insists on “island time” and the laid back, status quo mentality.
We clearly must embrace radical change.