In less than 10 years, technology has permeated our professional lives--from where we work to when we work to how we work. To compete in the coming "Information Age," business people will not only need to learn new job skills but will have to develop entirely news ways of thinking about the workplace. We asked some of America's most original technology thinkers about the coming changes and how they will affect the workplace. Here's what they said.

We foresaw in 1980 that people would be working at home. We coined the term "electronic cottage" for this phenomenon. At the time, we were scoffed at. Now it's acknowledged as an important development. The shift towards home-work has implications for everything from family structure to pollution. It also clearly affects women more than men. The new job creation has been in small business owned by women. Many of them run out of the home.

We will see a shift from the Industrial Age to the Third Wave (or Information Age). For example, if you look at factories, they operated on economies of scale; workers were interchangeable. Through introduction of intelligent technology the old mass-manufacturing paradigm is dying. It's now just as cheap to produce customized output as to produce mass product. And workers aren't interchangeable.

Old kinds of employment will be stressed. For example, shopping on the Net is a wonderful thing. It will reduce costs of products to consumers BUT it will cut into standard storefront retailing. The first to suffer will be uneducated entry-level people and significant social dislocations. But the idea that you can prevent this from happening is hokum. We haven't yet invented the social mechanisms for this transition.

Mr. Buchanan is wrong. The reason that there is a decline in the blue-collar work-force isn't because factories have gone abroad, but because the person who sells his muscles today is like the peasant at time of beginning of industrial revolution: he is a peripheral worker.

The industrial revolution caused terrible dislocations, and came with lots of pain and bloodshed over a period of 300 years. The Third Wave is spread only over decades and, unlike the industrial revolution, has spread globally. It will be an extremely painful social transition. Politicians, with very rare exceptions, understand this. We're hearing now from Gingrich and Gore and Clinton, who are talking about importance of preparing boys and girls so that they will be equipped to operate in the Information Age. If we train them to be industrial workers who are only lightly lettered, then we will fall behind, as a country.

We must remember that the social institution we take for granted--the factory, the school, the post office, the prison were all social inventions. We're in for another age of social invention and unless we recognize that we need it we will not get it.

Still, this is a great moment for women: a moment of upheaval, a moment for people to increasingly recognize the system they lived with didn't work. Control of information is one of the keys to power in the organization. As competition for high-level jobs increases, women will be locked out. This is the reason women are leaving the corporate world. If you ask "Who has the title VP or EVP?" it's largely men. But if you ask but who has the information necessary to solve problems, the power is gravitating to woman. Men may keep their jobs and paychecks--but they can't make decisions without good information from someone; and the source will be equally distributed.

The corporate structure is a dinosaur. The irony is that women are only beginning to penetrate any significant level of management just when the institution itself is about to crumble. The future doesn't consist of Fortune 500 companies who run everything. We'll see networks within nets within nets all over the world who are interacting. This doesn't mean there will be no big corporations: some functions require it. But they won't have the dominant role they do today.

The problem that the Net poses to legislators is that they've never had to deal with an animal like this before. What makes this animal so hard to grasp is that, first, you can't hold every carrier responsible for what people say. But it is a mass medium and that could be--and has been--controlled. So you have an oil and water mixture that is slippery as far as legislation is concerned.

While we are deeply sympathetic to the civil libertarian issues raised by the Clipper Chip and the V-chip, we believe that there are real electronic terrorist threats to American economy, which is more vulnerable than anybody else's. We don't think that the FBI and NSA and the military are making this stuff up. It is possible, for example, for hostile governments or even hackers, to take down systems which could be vital to the security of the economy and the security of institutions. To be opposed to any and all forms of observation is short-sighted. Corpoorations are particularly vulnerable--and stupid. They have relatively little redundancy, back-ups, failsafes or security systems. They are sitting ducks. So we can't have laissez-faire attitude.

The Internet represents how people would like to interact as workers. I think that the Internet will be the next site of explosive employment growth. Labor once shifted off the farm and into the factory; then it went out of the factory and into the office; now it will leave the office and get on the Internet.

The managerial hierarchy as a life-form is as obsolete as the office. The organization will be an abstract space--not a physical one--in which information circulates and people are meaningfully engaged with that information and with each other. The winners will be those who understand early and deeply that the old life-forms don't work anymore.

This will be a long-term process rather than an immediate business cycle or trendy management fad. I'm speaking of 30-year increments. But you must see the big picture so that your 5 to 10 year plans are consistent with that theory and flexible enough to change and adapt as you get more data.

Manufacturing itself will be as near to totally automated as possible with each generation of technology. This goes for office work too. At this point, we still need human beings. In fact, companies have ratcheted back on automation because they over-estimated technology and undervalued humans. But eventually everything will be automated. Big companies will still have manufacturing sites, but only 10% of employees will be involved in actual production.

Each customer will constitute a market. Everything that has to do with that transaction will become an information resource to attract the customer and maintain her fidelity. For example, let's say I manufacture trousers and I learn that a customer last bought a pair five years ago. Since I know that most waistlines thicken over 5 years, I would offer the customer pants with a 1" larger waistline.

In order to succeed in the new environment, we need people who constantly innovate, who understand human dynamics, and who operate dynamically and intelligently. For 100 years, we've created jobs that only use a few molecules of the human brain so we could exploit mass-production technology. The information economy requires that our capacity be developed.

To achieve this, employers will need to create an environment in which intelligent, dedicated people want to work. They will have to plow very serious resources into the education of their workers. It won't be enough to provide a training course on Windows 95; the firm must undertake to develop the intellectual and human potential of its employees.

Right now, we are at the end of one paradigm and the beginning of another. The old one was characterized by the use of the PC, which is something everyone can relate to. The new paradigm will be defined by network communicating. This presumes that there is almost always an accessible powerful network to which employees have access. In an office environment, the average working person will be sitting at a desk-top PC. This machine will be connected to a corporate Intranet which will have a gateway out into the Internet.

One of the consequences of the advent of the Web is that everything that's in digital bits will end up in a Web-server somewhere. Up until recently, one had to pay for information, or had to subscribe to something. Now, whether you are a scientific researcher in France or a fashion trends analyst in California, you'll have immediate access to free information.

Many thousands of companies have already begun using Intranets. Microsoft, Apple, Sun and all the technology companies will be launching them in 1996. This means that the people who produce information and those who analyze it will be directly connected. The people in the middle, the ones who mainly move information, will lose their jobs. The downsizing you're seeing now at corporations is because of the elimination of the middle. A lot of retraining is called for to keep employment up.

You will see a huge dislocation in the workplace, both good and bad. The Intranet will empower knowledge workers and disempower the handlers of information. It will flatten organization. These changes will affect every white collar, and even many blue collar, industries. Every company I deal with, regardless of what they do, believes use of Intranet will improve their business. The stereotype that this technology is for the hi-tech industry only is ridiculous. It's like saying that MiscroSoft MS Windows was only for technology companies.

To effectively use Intranets, you must develop a set of rules. At Sun, we have a well-designed set of rules that employees must follow. You write them down and you have a good firing once in a while to make the point stick. One must be serious both about developing rules and about enforcing them.

For example, it's legal for companies to read email but it's illegal for them to wiretap an office phone: yet many employees treat email the way they do their phones. Now, Sun doesn't don't have a staff assigned to screen employee email. Nonetheless, we have rules and expect employees to abide by them. Employees may not put anything harassing or unbusinesslike up on the Intranet, nor may they use profanities in their messages. Another example: employees aren't permitted to read each other's email or to break into each other's system. Yet every year, I have to fire someone who doesn't understand the concept of privacy.

Technology is a dramatically important tool for women achieving parity in the workplace. A couple of trends are happening simultaneously: first, there is an inexorable movement of women into the business world. At the same time, the opportunities for women to make their way in the business world and to achieve their rightful place in the economy will be facilitated by technology. Women will be able to raise kids without having to choose between family and career.

Women are eagerly adopting some types of technology; they have become a giant market for pagers--so much so that Motorola came out with purple and lavender beepers. Pagers and cellular phones seem to be a non-stop boom business. Women get them primarily to keep in touch with home and family. Then there is the growth of voicemail. It seems boring to us now, but ten years ago no one even had it.

Some people claim that technology makes everything impersonal- -but it also removes the intimidation factors and the ritualistic approaches to the way men and women interact, for example, the disgusting boss/secretary dynamic.

There are some frightening implications. You don't know who you are talking to on-line. On one hand, this means you do a lot more work without actually meeting anyone, which can be depressing. But you can also do business with someone on the other side of the planet, which makes it an acceptable trade- off.

The framework for the future has already been clearly laid out on the Web. Although no one is certain of the exact number, there are probably over 100,000 sites on the Web. On the Web, you can reach out to the world with mass micro-marketing. Let's say you want to find every single one of the 500 people in the world who are interested in Spam(tm): they will be hanging out in a group somewhere. Or let's say your target market is unmarried woman with small children who own their own business. In theory, you could instantly locate that micro-market by defining terms in the Web search engines. You can do this without the benefits of a large corporation behind you.

The concept of micro-marketing is evolving. Large corporations, as well as media and marketing players, are putting a lot of money into it. In the meantime the Net remains a very fragmented, specialization-centric market. This gives the private entrepreneur a huge competitive opportunity. You can compete against major corporations and win.

The biggest change in the workplace is that "9 to 5" no longer exists. The "workplace" has turned into a "workspace" by adding a new dimension to the office: electronic communications. One's office can now be the size of an actual office or it can shrink to the size of a cell-phone.

The use of technology will not replace in person business meetings. In fact, the more we communicate electronically the more we meet; and the more we meet, the more we want to communicate electronically. Business people who use email to stay in touch with contacts abroad may arrange a video conference one week and then, during the conference, arrange an in-person visit the next time they are in each other's region.

The concept of a distinct border between personal life and worklife is disappearing. Nowadays, people take business phone- calls at home and they take an extra 30 minutes at lunch-time to pick up their dry cleaning or kids. People are working increasingly with teams spread across borders and many time zones. It would be impossible to bring the teams together during the course of a normal workday. So the home dimension becomes necessary.

The "job" as we know it--as a unitary thing--is over. A job is now a bundle of rights and obligations flowing between employee and employer. Benefits, titles, salaries all become available on a kind of a cafeteria plan, giving employers and employees various options. For example, Recreational Equipment Inc. has part-time employees who get full benefits. Others have full-time consultants who get no benefits. Technology opens horizons and gives us a broad range of choices. In the best case, everyone gets exactly what she needs; in the worst, you end with employers using technology to take advantage of workers. For example, using technology to micro-track the keystroke efficiency of employees at a communications center is misguided, as is using technology in your office to force people to come into the office.

There will be a huge distinction between established companies who are introducing technology into the firm, and those which grow up around it and automatically adapt. What we are seeing overall is a shift from traditional, hierarchy-based organizations to organizations that are web-like, with responsibilities and linkages running in all directions. The right way to think about the new business structures is as workplace ecologies where everyone has a different, important role. Organizations will be more volatile, with teams forming and reforming around specific projects.

The workplace of the future will be increasingly computer- intensive. The health problems we've already seen will increase. The epidemic of Repetitive Stress Injury will demand better keyboards. Studies show that computers make noise that men can't hear. Women hear higher frequencies, and it drives them crazy; some women experience hearing loss from spending a lot of time around computers. Also, the kinds of tubes we have for monitors now are very hard on peoples' eyes. So unless our species mutates, industry will have to respond to these problems.

Eventually, more computing devices will be built in so they don't take up so much space. I work at home and I've got all this clutter around me. Computers will be smaller and able to do more and more quickly. I hope that computers will disappear into the wall and that screens will get bigger but not deeper. This will happen if they continue to develop flat-panel technology.

People say that technology flattens the organization. Untrue. A certain elimination of the middle is a great idea in theory; in practice, it's overwhelming to the executive. Hierarchy exists for a reason: information filters are necessary. A CEO can't take in 2000 email messages a day and be expected to have time to make decisions. Also, who do you want filtering your email? A clerical worker may not have the skills of a middle manager and might not be able to interpret the information correctly.

On some levels we've gotten accustomed to the idea that "we work really hard so we should be allowed the occasional personal contact, phone-call, email." This may come to an end. I just heard that a big computer company in Silicon Valley shuts off Web access to employees the last week of every quarter so they aren't surfing the Web when they should be working. Also, employers are getting more paranoid as assets of the companies are increasingly stored on databases. They are already watching you. Brokerage houses already monitor email for security violations.

This will get worse as technology grows. Workers will have to insist on clear policies. Progressive companies who care about workers will find solutions. The danger is that the workplace will become increasingly competitive because of downsizing and that employees will be less inclined to fight barbaric practices such as monitoring.

Technology is already eliminating jobs. If you can lay off 10% of your work-force, Wall St. loves you and you're a big success. There's nothing to retrain employees to do. For example, once the voice mail system is installed at Land's End, there is no place for the receptionist there to go: the job vanishes.

Technology is a great investment in a capitalist system. Companies can sell old equipment, amortize costs, write it off. Human beings aren't write-offs; they don't come off the bottom line. The good news for women is that technology permits them to do more from home so they can spend more time with their children. That is a great thing. The dark side is that you may be expected to work a lot more than if you came to an office and had boundaries around your work-life. I think employers will feel they are doing woman a big favor and will expect even more from them for the privilege of working from home.

Looking at the future, one could take the high road and say it will be great or one could make the case that communication technology will create distributed sweat-shops. Knowing when to unplug is an extremely serious concern. In my business, we recently realized that we're working harder now because we can: the computer never sleeps, never needs to go to the bathroom. We have to come to grips with the fact that we're human and must take care of ourselves.

The Virtual Corporation is almost upon us. Some people think that the result is that people will never stir from their nests. I see more people working at home more of the time, but then coming together with their work teams for meetings once a week, and more often for special occasions.

I see four different scenarios that could possibly play out in the 21st Century. First, backlash: we have a hi-tech world but women are prevented from participating fully. The Internet becomes ubiquitous, so huge and complex that you need intelligence agents to do your searches for you. But governments like Singapore and others decide to prevent women from reading materials they consider unsuitable so the agents they design don't give women equal access to information.

Second, a Golden Age of Equality. In a large-scale information world, organizations tend to be horizontal. Women are very good at networking and reaching out to other people.

Next, "Two Steps Forward and Two Steps Back": this is what women experience now. They are allowed to take new jobs and new responsibilities, but find that those new responsibilities are "feminized" and thus aren't deemed as valuable to society. So we have the great advantage of doing what we always wanted to do, with the disadvantage that it's dismissed as woman's work.

Finally, "Separate and Doing Fine, Thanks": women drop out and choose all-women environments. This would be a very small number. Women would work in women-controlled workplaces, because they grew tired of beating their heads against the glass. They will use technology for fast, accurate communication with other women.

The main privacy problem on the Net will be invisible monitors--whether intelligence agents or something else--which watch everything you do electronically. The people who mount them have no accountability, and a user has no awareness that she's being spied upon. I think we will have to safeguard our privacy and our freedom of expression. We are going to have to rewrite the laws. People will have to encrypt everything in their PC. Putting everything into code will make spying and falsification of electronic documents difficult. Otherwise when you're on-line an electronic spy could reach right in and find out what's on your disk.

The office of the future will be your personal workspace: it will look exactly as you wish it to look. In fact, nobody but you might ever see of it. Clearly, the space will need a digital receiver and a digital transmitter; whether this will be a powerful computer or a very simple one which lets you pull things off the Net, I cannot predict.

Also, people will be working shorter hours. The last two decades, white-collar workers have worked punishingly long hours. I imagine a revolt against that. People will work smarter not harder. They will be able to accomplish far more with better technology.

I think corporations are in trouble. The downsizing we're seeing is one indicator that their hierarchical structure is obsolete. The old hierarchy is based on a military paradigm. The new one respects autonomy and individuality. It doesn't demand absolute loyalty and obedience as the price of belonging to the organization. The Net is a great example of disorganized organization, where free individuals come together to create a whole that is far larger than the sum of its parts.

This is an opportunity to the entrepreneur. You can reach out to customers in a way not possible when we were more limited by time and space. An entrepreneur in Orem, UT can have access to as many customers as someone in the heart of New York City. Moreover, people will discover that they can be more productive networking on-line and that the discussions that occur on-line result in better business decisions. Planning meetings are ideally suited to cyberspace because you can work together interactively over time, exchanging product information and brainstorming on strategies. This can even be done anonymously-- which often results in better, more honest feedback.

Cyberspace technology also allows interested customers to shape products. For example, OS/2 was first developed under IBM's old assumptions. But the online group, Team OS/2, generated so much feedback on the product that executives paid attention and began to be more active online in seeking ideas. When companies listen to more customers sooner in the product development cycle, the final product is molded by customers' needs and desires. Everyone benefits by having a higher-quality product. Both OS/2 and Windows 95 had customers even before they were released.

In the old days, executives controlled in-house communications. Now, with Intranets, employee communications are direct and unfiltered by management. Leaders will have to learn the new communications media or risk losing touch with their employees. New leaders are emerging who challenge those who operate on the old assumptions.

Meanwhile, individuals will need more than ever to define their own priorities, or they will be overwhelmed by the quantity of information available. In the past, getting information was largely a function of where you were in the hierarchy. Now it's a function of how much time you devote to gathering it. The average person with access to the Net has more information available to her than did any CEO 10 or 15 years ago. This will improve outward mobility: more and more people will be leaving corporations when they recognize how abundant the opportunities are in the entrepreneurial environment of cyberspace.

One of the most profound ways that technology will impact the workplace is that in-office communication will be dominated by electronic forms. Microsoft already communicates internally exclusively by email. Many experts expect that will be true of most firms within five years. Email is taking the place of hard- copy--such as memos--and voice communications. Email may never substitute for them, but it's clear there will be less memo writing.

This is consistent with what we have seen happening with voicemail systems. Both email and voicemail are asynchronous; you don't have to be there to receive the message yet your client may leave it immediately; you, in turn, reply whenever you wish. It provides immediacy to both sides, and gives the user choices.

We can also look to Sun Microsystems and see how they're using the Intranet. This is when one uses the Internet in-house by setting up an internal Website to which only your employees have access. Many firms on the cutting edge of technology have done this. And, just as email is not limited to technogeeks, applications like an internal Website are open to all employees.

The Intranet is very cost-effective. Web software and tools, plus the distribution network of the Net, are already in place, making it far cheaper than setting up a LANS system. Also, an employee sitting her desk can do Web research on competitors and on industry regulatory issues.

The Internet holds out the promise of leveling the playing field for women in a way nothing else can. It gives anyone the opportunity to be a publisher: if you set up your own Web site, you're a publisher. You can be like TIME magazine. An example: a recent study on pornography received an enormous amount of media attention. But the report was wrong and we challenged it on our site. This ultimately resulted in a retraction in TIME.

If women become sophisticated with this medium, it will be to their advantage. It will impact their ability to rise through the corporations. Hypermedia browsers make it more likely now than ever before for women to develop expertise--point-and-click only takes intelligence, not a degree. All of this depends on women learning the technology and demonstrating a willingness to embrace new ideas.

The percentage of women on-line is growing dramatically. A few years ago, only 5% of users were women, now estimates are 32-40% women on the Web; most of this growth has come in the last year. At the same time, the fastest growing segment of business- owners is women. Many are home-based because the Web facilitates communications and information-providing from home.

If firms don't understand how to harness the power of these new media, they will be left behind. In order to be sophisticated users and developers, managers will also need to keep their eyes on the regulatory landscape. The new laws can virtually shut down small businesses which don't have the resources to fight zealous efforts by people who object to what's on their Web pages. We could see the Net turned into a centralized or broadcast medium, where everything must travel through a central pipe, and where someone can control and censor content. That would be the crime of the century.

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