The Age of Turnaround

Welcome to the 21st century. It seems to have arrived sooner than anyone expected, but then, most things do these days. Everything happens fast. Blink and you'll miss the latest trend. Go on a two-week no-media vacation and entire empires might fall without your knowing a thing about it.

This is an age of change in which virtually everything is changing, including the nature of change itself.

In the 20th century, change generally meant growth or destruction. Small things became big things, and then even bigger things. What was good for General Motors was good for the country. As GM got bigger, the country got richer. There seemed to be no end to this process. Change was unending growth.

In the 20th century, wars became such vast, un-differentiated enterprises that we assigned them Roman numerals, like centuries. The atomic bomb was the perfect weapon for the century of ever-bigger things. With nuclear weapons, the state could destroy not just its enemies but...everything. George Orwell was the greatest prophet of the 20th century. No book penetrated the century's monolithic secrets more deeply than 1984.

Then everything changed. The Cold War ended. Just like that. It didn't happen in the classic 20th century fashion, with planes dropping bombs that killed lots of people. Instead, civilians went out and knocked down the Berlin Wall. And when the old guard staged a coup in Moscow, the people took to the streets. There was no new Stalin among the plotters. Nobody with his 20th century iron hand. Only a handful of protesters died in the process of liquidating an empire that had killed millions. Some members of the old guard had the decency to commit suicide.

How did it happen? The way everything happens now: suddenly and decisively. Turnaround does not loiter. The metaphor for change used to be biology. Mostly it was orderly growth; occasionally it was unexpected mutation--cancer. Turnaround has more in common with quantum physics. Change happens instantaneously across both space and time.

The 20th century was the age of great institutions--states, corporations, bureaucracies--that controlled information. The individual had less and less access to information. (In Orwell's dystopia, the state manufactured truth according to its convenience and needs.) Truth became harder to know because it was either classified a state secret or was the property of some monopoly. Remember the Pentagon papers, the official history of the Vietnam war that the government went to great length to keep out of the hands of its citizens?

The great tool of turnaround is the computer. Or more precisely, the personal computer. With the PC, there are no secrets. When the Soviet Union died, the state had the tanks but the civilians had the PCs and the fax machines. The old guard had been woefully outgunned.

The PC itself is a perfect metaphor for the age of turnaround. It evolved more furiously in a year than the automobile did in a decade--and got lighter, faster and cheaper almost by the week. The process is too much for even IBM to handle. The computer revolution has left its founders in the dust. That is a case of pure turnaround.

The revolution in information has created an entirely new set of expectations, a mood that is the soul of turnaround. It is a new dialectic. It is not strictly that which is old that is in peril. Turnaround doesn't punish or reward merely on the basis of age. But the established, the large and the complacent--such as GM, IBM and the former Soviet Union--are in trouble. It is a time to be lean and alert. Turnaround feeds on corpulence and complacency.

There are no maps to the new world of turnaround. It's still too early. Anyway, how can you map a landscape that is constantly changing? But there are some indicators and signposts. There are some trend lines and rules, though few, not surprisingly, that are hard and fast.

Winners and Losers

CNN is a winner. Network news is a loser. The reasons are simple enough. CNN is there when you need it. Since it isn't weighted down with prima donnas and their salaries, it can travel light.

IBM is a loser. Bill Gates and his innovative Microsoft team are winners. GM is a loser, though Saturn--its one accommodation to the forces of turnaround--is a winner.

South Korea is a winner. If Korea is ever reunited, Japan had better watch its flanks.

Macy's and other department stores are losers. Direct mail is a winner.

Vans and pickups are winners. Station wagons are losers.

Harleys and dirt bikes are winners. Travel light and move fast if you want to keep up with turnaround.

The NBA is a winner. Major-league baseball is a loser.

The Pittsburgh Pirates (poor but smart) are winners. The New York Mets (rich but dumb) are losers.

Congress, cash and the Roman Catholic hierarchy are losers.

Electronic--as in mail, banking, shopping--is an instant winner.

Rifles, mortars and hand grenades are winners, while ICBMs and poison gas, no use in the streets of Sarajevo, are losers.

The end of history--a trendy little intellectual conceit--is history. Things are going to get quite interesting.

The center cannot hold

The opening act in the age of turnaround was the collapse of the Soviet Union and its empire. There was nothing organic about the old arrangement. It was pure 20th century--an abstract bureaucratic construction held together by force. Much of the world's map, as we've known it, was drawn this way. A lot of shotgun marriages are going to be breaking up. In many cases, the divorces will be bloody. Consider Yugoslavia. But make no mistake, it took blood to maintain the old factions, too.

The forces of turnaround will continue to move the world toward smaller, more logical political arrangements. The union of Europe, so confidently assumed last year, now appears dicey. The trend is toward secession, not union. Already there is talk in Scotland of going it alone. Quebec wants out of Canada. And northern California has had it with its profligate south. Staten Island wants out of New York City. And there is a secessionist movement in Vermont. Come to think of it, what do Social Circle, Georgia and Venice Beach have in common, anyway?

Royal Flush

The House of Windsor survived the 20th century through massive infusions of sentiment (money helped) and, after the wedding of the century between Di and Chuck, looked impregnable. The adoring magazine cover stories rolled on endlessly until it seemed that nothing in life could be more sublime than polo and charity balls. Then...turnaround. The fictions of royalty could not survive the truths of the information age--not with scanners aimed at cellular phones. Princesses can be suicidal, narcissistic and bulimic, and princes can be insensitive horses' asses. Even the supporting cast can behave like a bunch of plebes. Hey, Fergie, show us your tits. Will the last duke out of Buckingham Palace please turn out the lights? And will he bring the bulbs?

From the Penthouse to the big house

Turnaround loves a big, stationary target.

Mike Milken went to jail because he believed what was written about him. He could do any deal, he owned the junk bond market and he would transform American finance. He was a master of the universe. Now he is an inmate. It's a light lockup, but he's still not allowed to wear his rug.

Mike Tyson heard it all the time. He was the youngest man to win the heavyweight championship. It was his for as long as he wanted it. He was too big, too strong and, above all, too mean to lose or even to get hurt. He ruled the world, until a journeyman took his measurements and then left him flopping on the canvas, looking for his mouthpiece.

Mike still didn't get it. Maybe a man could stop him but, for sure, no woman could. Now he is doing six years of hard time in Indiana. If you want to get into the ring with turnaround, you need to be a counterpuncher.

Asleep at the switch

There are other conspicuous people who should have known better. Even in the nation's capital, they didn't catch on when the rules changed. When turnaround cut them off at the knees, they were bewildered and hurt. It seemed so unfair.

Clark Clifford made a career out of being thought of as the shrewdest man in Washington. As advisor to presidents and wheeler-dealer extraordinaire, his reputation and cozy relationship with the press protected him. These days, a reputation can be a liability, and a man in power can't be sure of his friends. When the prosecutors charged fraud, the smartest man in Washington said he'd been duped by a bunch of Arabs--that he was just an ignorant but innocent fool. The grand juries didn't believe him.

Jim Wright made a career out of logrolling in Congress. He was from Texas and believed that if it had worked for Lyndon Johnson, then, hell, boy, it ought to work for him. But LBJ lived in an age when one man could bully all of Washington if he had the stones. Times changed. Washington became a town of scalp hunters. A Speaker of the House would do until it was time to knock off another president.

Surviving and Thriving

Some people understand almost intuitively what the new world calls for. Where Gary Hart tried to fight back, Bill Clinton hunkered down and let the media punch themselves arm weary. Bill knows turnaround. Alan Dershowitz is the lawyer who understands: Your best chance to win is on appeal. Peter Lynch of Fidelity understood it. David Lynch of Twin Peaks did not. Roger Smith at General Motors had never heard of it. Lee Iacocca was just catching on when he retired. Jimmy Johnson and Jerry Jones of the Dallas Cowboys got it. Turn it all around, brother. Mike Lynn, who gave them the store for Herschel Walker, didn't have a clue. Leona Helmsley didn't get it. Neither did Donald Trump--but then, arrogance is made to be undone by turnaround. Knowledge makes you humble. People on the front lines of turnaround, such people as Václav Havel, make the point. Havel went from playwright to political prisoner to the presidency of Czechoslovakia and then to private life with the peace and grace that comes with understanding. He is a hero of turnaround.

Kiss of Death

Talk about not getting it: Time named Mikhail Gorbachev Man of the Decade only two years before he was sent to pasture. It was inevitable. Time is the perfect 20th century institution, where news flows from the reporters in the field up through layers of bureaucracy. The clerks and ministers rework it and rethink it until it becomes the vision of a few suited men sitting in big offices in a tall, sealed-glass building. Like Gorbachev, they would be the last to know. Like him, they believe the process can be managed. As Emerson knew, events are in the saddle and ride mankind. Those who try to manage turnaround will be buried by it.

You want turnaround? I'll give you turnaround

Ross Perot. From bantam rooster to cock of the walk to the Dallas chicken to feisty phoenix--all in one season. The experts were a day late and a dollar short the whole time, and, for Perot, turnaround kept turning.

Institutional turnaround

The United States military was nearly ruined by its misadventure in Vietnam. But there are advantages to having nothing left to lose. The officers who were bloodied and disillusioned by Vietnam but chose to stay in uniform remade their services with volunteers instead of conscripts. After shaky road shows in Grenada and Panama, the military met the (conscripted) forces of a nation that had won its last war (and that had, according to popular wisdom, one of the finest, most battle-tested armies of the world). The Americans had fewer men than the Iraqis. But the American military had the technology, the motivation, the (concluded on page 200)Turnaround(continued from page 78) intelligence and the speed--the four horsemen of turnaround.

Don't bet on it

In the age of turnaround, nothing is riskier than a sure thing. Betting that things will continue on their present courses is high-risk behavior. In the age of nearly perfect information, trends create countertrends. Nothing is forever, and in the age of turnaround, forever is less than 365 days.

Remember when oil was a sure thing? Finite supply, infinite demand. No way the price could go anywhere but up. This was what was being said in the oil patch ten years ago when sweet crude was at $35 a barrel. Before the end of the century it would hit $100, everyone said. Now the price is stuck around $20 and bumper stickers on the pickups say, "Lord, please give us another oil embargo. I swear I won't piss it all away this time."

And Japan was recession proof, IBM could never go anywhere but up, lending money to Donald Trump and Third World governments was risk free.

Après Moi, Le Déluge

Some individuals are strong enough to hold back turnaround all by themselves. But nobody lives forever.

• the Pope

• Deng Xiaoping

• Fidel Castro

Return of the wild

Turnaround does not favor monocultures or extinctions. Wild things can come back, especially in the creases. The wolves are back in Yellowstone Park. There are bears in New Jersey shopping centers. And alligators are a menace on the water holes of Florida golf courses. Endangered, my ass. I'm going to eat somebody.

Some things have been turned around

The telephone

Some are struggling...

Eastern Europe

...And some are holding out

• The CIA. The Cold War was its raison d'être. But the agency seemed, well, surprised by just about every major event of the Cold War, including its end. Now the boys at Langley say the CIA is more vital than ever. Observe the buzzards over Langley.

• Public education costs more every year for increasingly dismal results. The City of New York employs more educational administrators than all of what used to be called Western Europe. Johnny can't read and is too dumb to know it. Asian kids are eating his lunch, and if things don't change, the only job open to him will be cooking it for them. When Chris Whittle proposed a modest little network of competing private schools and hired Benno Schmidt of Yale to run it, the National Education Association (a lobby as powerful as the NRA) squealed like a stuck pig. Hark, it is the sound of turnaround.

Fed Ex

It has been around for a while, so we tend to take those little red-white-and-blue trucks for granted. The overnight mails have made literal turnaround possible. Business can be done in a day. Lobsters go from Maine to Minneapolis in time for lunch. A contract is out to the coast tomorrow. Fed Ex did more than move the mail, it raised expectations and demonstrated that even the most stubborn forms of gridlock can be broken. Time saved was important, but the sense of liberation was even more of a breakthrough. The fax was the inevitable next step. Things have to move and, sometimes, overnight is just, well, too slow.

Nothing is forever

In the age of turnaround, it is impossible to make predictions based strictly on the way things are now. Apocalyptic prophecies are, at best, useless. The greenhouse effect, the spread of heterosexual AIDS, gridlock in Congress, the proliferation of nuclear weapons and lawyers--none of these evils is inevitable, no more than "progress," which we all once believed was our birthright. Things change, sometimes even for the better. But you shouldn't count on progress any more than you should expect Social Security to take care of you in your dotage. Be a good animal and pay close attention to the signs. Live for the short run because the long run is unknowable, and "In the long run, we are all dead," as J. M. Keynes said.