January 20, 1998



Dear friends,

It's been more than a year since my last Letter from Minnesota, although I write to you daily via NewWork News. It's gratifying to hear from so many of you on a continuing basis.

Much has happened during the past year. Our site continues to receive recognition from business, governmental, and other organizations over much of the globe, and we've received additional attention from the press, both print and electronic. For instance, here are a couple of recent articles about us which happen to be available on the Internet, one from CityBusiness, the other from the St. Paul Pioneer Press. Recently, we were recommended by Encyclopedia Britannica, which we appreciate.

Our readership has continued to build in North America and abroad--enough so, in fact, to change some of our plans. You may recall my telling you that my colleague Dr. Jerry Willenbring and I originally had intended to write a small book called "Brave New Work World." The project was sidetracked when Jerry's principal partner in another business became ill. This meant that he has had to give virtually all of his time and attention to Careers Online, Inc. , which he moved from Texas to San Diego. We're happy to report that COL, Inc. has become one of the world's most highly regarded hi-tech placement firms, happily bringing technical professionals into contact with employers over much of the globe.

At any rate, I spent a little time searching for an appropriate co-author for the intended book, and, though several experts seemed interested, I eventually decided to shift the manuscript's focus, target a somewhat different audience, and complete it on my own. However, BNWW & NWN now have a larger regular audience than we could realistically hope to accumulate with a conventional book of this sort over several years, so there doesn't seem much point to it now. The new media are having a similar impact on the book industry overall, which is struggling at the moment.

The book project was never driven by financial considerations. Specialized books of this sort earn mostly pennies for their authors, even if, unlike most of the tens of thousands of books published each year, they succeed in the market. Only authors of major popular blockbusters or of major university textbooks in wide distribution can hope to produce significant income from writing books, let alone the possibility of wealth. As has been the case through most of history, most authors and scholars are motivated, not by financial gain, but by opportunities to contribute.

In my own case, I produce income by a variety of means, but things are changing. For instance, I recently retired my Twin Cities consulting practice of eighteen years and vacated my St. Paul-area office of twenty years. While I would be willing to deposit the checks if I won the zillion million lottery, it's doubtful that I would squander much of it on the things with which so many people in capitalist societies seem preoccupied, which much of the developing world lusts after, but which mostly just trivialize precious life. I'm a capitalist with material appetites that have either greatly moderated with age or that have become sated. I want less "stuff" now, not more, so we will have to seek other explanations for most of my work at this point.

Incidentally, I was involved in a major international textbook project for a while early last year. My role was extremely minor, and the whole thing turned out to be far less interesting or important than I thought it might become. There have been additional textbook opportunities during the year, but, overall, I think I've learned that I probably don't want to write textbooks or parts of textbooks. I've been involved in other people's text projects over the years in various roles, but that stage probably is over as well. For one thing, there's only so much time or energy, and, long ago, I resigned myself to the need to forego most of life's opportunities for spending either.

I'm continuing work on a couple of other small book projects, though, and I still have academic affiliations. I've also been writing for a distinguished continental European magazine and journal of ideas, and this is a relationship that I have enjoyed. My latest article, Trop de compétitionnous en crèverons, appears in the October 1997 edition of Le Temps Stratégique . It is an edited French-language adaptation of the English original, which is titled "The ideology of competition." My previous article, "Demain les emplois reviendront-ils?", was published in the October 1996 edition, and is adapted from the English language original, titled "Will there be enough jobs?"

We've heard from additional broadcast organizations over the past year or so too, but, although I expect eventually to return to the air in one role or another, nothing is in preparation. I have had multiple opportunities to make the wrong broadcast deals over the past four years or so, but I want to wait for some of the right ones.

BraveNewWorkWorld has been in its third year since last October. NewWork News was two years old on January 2. The archives of our news briefs accumulate to book length in about four months, and all of our stories are still available on our site for the convenience of students, university researchers, members of the press, and others. We hope eventually to have a search engine on our site. For the time being, you can use the "find" command in your browser, but you'll have to search each monthly archive separately. We apologize for the inconvenience, but ours is a non-profit, volunteer-based organization. We have not sought foundation support, and we're doing our best to avoid cluttering up our site with advertising. Needless to say, all of the contributors to BNWW & NWN do other things, and some are among the leaders in their respective fields, so there's a limit to how much time they can give to us.

Unfortunately, many primary news sources do not archive their daily stories on the web, much to our disappointment. As a consequence, a large number of the links to the original stories that we embed in our news briefs go dead or begin to point to irrelevant materials fairly quickly. Too bad, quite sad, but it's something over which we have no control. NewWork News will be most useful if you check in with us daily. That way, you'll quickly get an overview of the day's work-related events over much of the globe, and you'll be able to click on links that will take you directly to original stories of special interest.

Incidentally, links or "bookmarks" to NewWork News that were set up more than a few months ago will no longer work. This is because we have had to move our site to a different server, and the apostrophe in NWN's original URL turns out to be an illegal character on the new system. We recognize that putting an apostrophe in a URL in the first place amounts to serious "operator malfunction" on our part, particularly in a largely Unix-based web world. I can't explain the mindless lapse. However, recall that, only a few years ago, a lot of very bright computer people apparently were unable to predict that the year 2000 would come along soon. So there.

At any rate, spread the word: NewWork News has not gone "off the air," despite the fact that, as this is written, Yahoo still hasn't fixed its reference to us. Take the apostrophe out of NWN's original URL, and everything will be fine.

After a long period of preparation--and distraction by many other things--we're finally beginning to get WITNE: Women in the New Economy underway, under the editorship of my colleague Teresa Callies, who recently returned from another trip to Greece and surrounding region. We hope to build WITNE into a major global resource over the years ahead.

Also, we have plans for the further development of NewWork Ed Watch and NewWork Tech Watch, as well, under the direction of their respective editors. So far, we've done little with these pages, but we intend for them eventually to become resource-rich sites in their own right. We also have other plans for BNWW & NWN, as well as for the non-profit "think tank" organization of which our web site is only a part.


What's hot and what's not among world economies

As I write this, world attention has been focused on the economic crises that have been spreading across Asia over the past several months. These amount to a reality check in a variety of Asian countries and a consequent reduction in the value of both stocks and local currencies. Actually, the situations of the affected countries are more complex than that, and have arisen because of a variety of factors coming together at this particular time. Moreover, while both Japan and South Korea have been having financial problems, their situations are quite different. There is not a single economic problem in Asia, but several. Nonetheless, this seems to be the biggest economic story of the year.

Meanwhile, the American economy will soon achieve the distinction of enjoying the longest expansion in its history. The stock market is strong, inflation is low, job creation is high, and labor shortages are developing in various sectors and geographical regions. Many experts are calling it the best American economy in at least a generation, maybe the best ever, at least according to conventional criteria.

Not many years ago, many persons in both Asia and North America were anticipating American decline and claiming that the 21st century would belong to the Asian "tigers." Indications are that the Pacific Rim will continue to be important as expected. Much value remains in these economies, so, once the adjustments have been made, painful as they will be for large numbers of people, we can expect that the "tigers" will not remain toothless. South Korea, for example, recovered from the devastation of the Korean War to become the world's 11th economy in only about 45 years. That hasn't been all smoke and mirrors.

However, much is happening in other parts of the world as well--in south Asia and Latin America, for instance. Even England and Ireland--not places where most of us would look for vibrant economies during most of the post-war period--are now surging. If Europe as a whole ever gets itself together, the troubled economies on the continent--some of which currently have record post-war unemployment--could also begin to thrive.

The United States is unlikely to dominate the 21st century as it has during most of the 20th. Nonetheless, it has made greater progress than most others in the transition to the new global information economy, with attributes that we've been describing over the past two years. The U.S. has the strongest economy in the world right now, and no serious problems are visible on the horizon. It now appears that all of the hand-wringing over America's "inevitable decline" as an economic, political, cultural, and moral force in the world was highly premature.

Two centuries ago, about two and one-half million people hugging the eastern seaboard of North American set in motion processes that transformed Europe and inaugurated the modern era worldwide. America began in a Western world dominated by monarchy, aristocratic privilege, the "divine right of kings," a lack of appreciation of the individual, let alone of individual rights, and the accepted institution of slavery which, in the West, had continued mostly uninterrupted since Classical times, even through the centuries dominated by Western religions.

Aristocratic slave holders in North America, including one who proclaimed that "all men are created equal," worked with others to combine a statement of ideals, subject to broadened interpretation, with the First Amendment and a true separation of political powers. This resulted in contradictions plus a creative tension which have produced increased democratization over the years since.

However, while we have become politically and economically more democratic over the past two centuries, economic inequality has increased sharply during recent years. In part, this seems a natural consequence of the increased level of skill required by the new information economy, as well as the increased power of the financial markets in driving a fundamental restructuring of work organizations over much of the globe.

Even in a strong economy with low unemployment and high levels of job creation, tens of millions of Americans are struggling and feeling insecure and frustrated. At present, job insecurity, the increasing emphasis on temporary work, and other elements of the new "just-in-time" way of organizing work are greatly eroding the American middle-class and putting large numbers of individuals and families through a meat grinder. These are among the costs of doing business in the new economy, but they are costs that society, not employers are paying.

They are reminiscent of earlier years when many corporations were tremendously profitable, in large part, because they were not required to count the costs associated with the impact of their operations on the environment. Until society began to insist that companies pay for cleaning up their own messes, these costs were passed on to others, which artificially inflated profits and stock values, and exacerbated the have vs. have-not gap. We seem to be in a similar situation now, except that the new "off the books" costs involve health and quality of life for individuals, families, and communities. It amounts to a pollution of our social environment this time, rather than our physical environment.

Eventually, these conditions will create a highly volatile social and political climate, if the long experience of history is any guide. America must push deeper into the revolutionary new world economy, but it cannot tolerate leaving a major proportion of its people behind. Society determines the rules by which the business game is played, but the rules presently in place are those of the old economy, for the most part, not the new.

On the threshold of the new millennium, America surely isn't perfect, but, then, it isn't done yet. The American Revolution continues, and remains a model for the world. As before, our ideals, our First Amendment, and our separation of powers will work the new contradictions out of our system over time. Presently, at least, many of the world's countries might prefer America's problems to their own. As American television personality Jack Paar once remarked, "Immigration is the sincerest form of flattery." Despite its imperfections, America continues to attract, inspire, and lead.


The new work world of healing doctors and teaching doctors

We've also been watching trends in health care and higher education, which, in the United States during the 1980s and 1990s, have had escalating costs in common. Costs have increased at similar rates in both fields, much faster than the overall rate of inflation. Society's response has been to further ration health care and higher educational services, one way or another.

The need to control costs has resulted in a rapid restructuring of the health service system, and few people, patients and health care professionals included, seem greatly satisfied with the direction in which things have been going. For a number of years, we suffered, not so much a health care crisis in the United States, as a health care cost crisis. However, now the quality of care, for those who can obtain it, seems to be threatened as well. Nonetheless, tens of millions of Americans still have no health coverage at all.

For generations, the professionals on the front lines who have direct patient contact have made the key decisions, and they've been in the best position to know what is needed in each case. Now, however, committees, driven in large part by corporate profit and stock price considerations, have taken many treatment decisions out of the hands of individual physicians.

The forces that have been transforming much of the rest of the work world have also been restructuring health care, and the medical profession, as we have understood it for more than a century, is losing stature and power, perhaps to the detriment of ailing individuals as well as society as a whole.

Health care, as traditionally practiced, has been quite "messy" economically. That is, it has had to respond in a highly flexible, decentralized manner to the special needs of a multitude of individuals. Such a system cannot operate in a highly efficient manner as if it had only one or a few clear objectives, as most ordinary corporations can do.

Now, all this is changing. Rapidly escalating costs have attracted the attention of people who know how to make systems run more efficiently--at least in the narrow sense that will satisfy politicians, corporate stockholders, and others with limited perspective or very short attention spans. However, as a consequence of controlling costs, the essential character of the heath care system is changing, perhaps even to the point of betraying its central mission. The people in charge now are the ones who are best at serving a single bottom-line organizational objective such as profit, not the tremendous variety of individual needs and circumstances that one finds in real life.

In an article published recently in the Journal of the American Medical Association, hundreds of health care professionals said that, under so-called "managed care," the ancient, honorable medical profession is in danger of losing its soul. Because the "solutions" may be as bad as the problems they were intended to solve, growing public concern seems to be pushing health care toward the top of the political agenda again too. Expect additional legislation, and hope that it will make things better rather than worse.


The cost of higher education has been increasing about as fast as the cost of health care. For example, between 1980 and 1995, the overall cost of living in the United States increased by 82 percent. During the same period, the cost of college went up 234 percent, according to the General Accounting Office. We may expect higher education to experience some of the same pressures as health care, with similar results.

At the very time that the world off campus has been getting increasingly skeptical of many of academe's central rituals and symbols, the hi-tech revolution, combined with a strong privatization drive throughout the economy, is offering more cost-efficient ways of doing things, at least limited things. Expect strong pressures to reduce the goals of higher educational institutions to the point of simplism, perhaps at the cost of academe's fundamental, diverse mission. Also, expect a decline in the influence of scholars and teachers on the front lines. As with medicine, expect the people who know the most about the institution's central work to have less influence on what is done and how it is done. Expect radical changes in American higher education.

In fact, those changes are already underway, and many of the people on the campuses may be among the last to hear about them. For instance, the corporate world is already building a very large advanced education and training system of its own, much of it on-line. Also, in large part because of pressures to control costs, many conventional colleges and universities are already offering a wide variety of college programs for credit on the Internet. Boston-area author and editor Elizabeth Shostak surveyed the new world of on-line education for us about a year ago in her article, "Higher Ed and Higher Tech." Also, California professor Jerry Farber worries about present trends. He shares his concerns in his article, "The Student and the Screen". Finally, David Noble, in a major article published elsewhere, examines "Digital diploma mills: the automation of higher education."

Hi-tech offers important possibilities for higher education, but I fear that too much of it will move to the Internet too quickly and for the wrong reasons. Legislatures have been sending a message to many universities that they will have to do more with less. However, I believe that there are many people in positions of power, particularly those with a "bottom-line" orientation, who will be perfectly satisfied if academe ends up doing less with less.

In a variety of ways, much of the academic establishment seems to be painting a big target on itself. It is contributing to its own vulnerability during an extremely dangerous time, not only because of the costs, but also in how it conducts many of its own affairs. I expressed some of my concerns about higher ed trends more than two years ago in my article, "From the DA's Office". While it was intended as a devil's advocacy piece, I really do believe some of the things I said. I leave to the reader's imagination to decide which ones.


It appears that I will be speaking at the Hudson Institute's global workforce conference in Indianapolis around the end of September, so I may see some of you there. In the meantime, as American public radio personality Garrison Keillor says, "Do good work," and have a good winter, if you're in the northern hemisphere, a good summer if you're in the south.

Gary G. Johnson
January 20, 1998

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