ANEXO 2: FORMATO CÓDIGO GESCAL

The new heroes are staminacs – people who never seem to sleep. Recently, Bill Gates, who claims to relax quite a bit nowadays, said that, “There are days that I work 14 hours, but most days I don’t work more than 12 hours. On week- ends I rarely work more than 8 hours.”20 _{The average}

American now works 25 percent more than he or she did in the early 1970s.21_{It is not only Bill Gates who works unfea-}

sibly and unhealthily long hours.

While working harder is one natural response to the funky world we find ourselves in, we seriously doubt that it is the best answer. If it were, the ultimate winners in the funky village would be people with little or no need to sleep. Instead of working harder, funky people work smarter. They do what they are really good at, maybe 100 times better. Period. Try beating that by reducing sleep.

Advances in IT have pushed us into a connected econ- omy. And connected systems allow for real-time feedback. The dominant organization of the past may legally have been one entity, but was often better characterized as dis- connected or even dismembered. It could take four weeks, or maybe sometimes four months, for the factory to hear from the salespeople at the other end of the world about booms or slumps. In the wired world supply chain feedback is instant. When something happens in Milan, the partners in New York, Montevideo and Sydney know about it imme- diately. Think Benetton; think sheep.

Firms, supply chains, industries, markets and even entire economies are being transformed into ultra-sensitive systems where changes anywhere are instantly registered everywhere. It’s like pulling in a fishing net – no matter where you start pulling, kinetic energy will be reproduced throughout the entire net. It’s like a cobweb where the spider is capable of sensing movement wherever a bug or fly has landed in the web. But remember that such sensitive systems are fragile. Every now and then they can, and do, break down or collapse.

Why, then, is real-time feedback so important? Let us just provide a few examples. In the computer industry, compo- nent costs decline by approximately 1 percent every week.22

You don’t want inventory – you want instant information. As noted earlier, the key to success is replacing information for inventory. Dell turns around its inventory 52 times per year. The equivalent number for Compaq is 13.5 and for IBM it’s 9.8.23_{In which company would you buy stocks?}

In addition, real-time feedback enables organizations to respond much more quickly and more accurately to cus- tomer demands. We can get better service. For instance, buying a bunch of CDs or books over the Net, we can immediately find out if they are in “stock” (at least virtu- ally). Information on the books or CDs which people with similar taste have bought is at our fingertips. Reviews, writ- ten by other customers on the items we are planning to buy are displayed on the screen in front of us. It’s the return of the local grocery store, where the dealer always knew the special interests and demands of Mrs Jones or Mr Black, though this time in digital form.

The age of auctions

The main impact of the real-time society on business is in making way for the age of auctions. In the bazaar, the fish market or at a traditional auction, prices were (and still are) always set in real time. Over time, shifts in supply and demand determine the price. Financial markets still function in that way. When we buy stocks in Motorola, Siemens, Sony, Nokia or Ericsson, we do not know exactly how much we are paying until the deal is closed. But, when we get a new mobile phone from any of these companies we know the price in advance. Why? The simple answer is that fixed prices reduce uncertainty, for both the seller and the buyer

– Prozac pricing. In the funky village, however, change is a constant and instead of reducing uncertainty the emphasis will be on reducing friction – all the stuff that prevents the realization of perfect markets. In an info desert – lack of information or asymmetrically distributed information – the seller knows things that the buyer does not have a clue about, like when you buy a used car – all prevent the reali- zation of market perfection. But in an info jungle, sooner or later, friction-free capitalism will happen.

Thanks to new technology and changes in our values, prices for any type of goods or service can once more be set instantly – as a consequence of changes in supply and demand. This is precarious pricing. We are back in the bazaar, but this time the bazaar is not necessarily limited in space. Auction Web held 330,000 on-line auctions during the first quarter of 1997.24 _{And since then, the auction market has}

moved from being lukewarm to white hot. On-line auction- eer eBay carries 9000 products in 1086 categories and has 140,000,000 hits per week.25 _{Its customers come from}

every corner of the globe.

Real-time pricing spreads like a forest fire. We see it in the power utility industry, electronics industry, telecoms industry and airline industry. Cathay Pacific Airways put up 387 seats of various classes for auction. The company got 15,000 bids.26_{The Swedish firm Mr Jet and the American}

company Price Line sell airline tickets over the Net. You enter your price, route and credit card number. If the part- ner airline accepts the deal, you will hear about it within an hour. In six months Price Line got bids worth some $294 million. It is now applying the same business model to

108 FU N KY B US I N E SS FUNKY VILLAGE

Real-time pricing spreads like a forest fire. We see