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Fifteen years of Globe 100 change

Census Analysis Tracks 100 Years of Change

U.S. depository libraries change: SIXTY PERCENT OF NEW TITLES NOW AVAILABLE ONLINE

Electronic books and the future of publishing

From the Workplace to the Classroom: Innovation, Reform, and Resistance in the Communication Age

Cultural Change The next one 

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Fifteen years of Globe 100 change

By Charles Stein, Globe Staff

In some fields — say astronomy or geology — 15 years is no time at all. Blink and you miss it. But in business, the story is quite different.

Business years are more like dog years: A lot happens in a short time. As we publish the 15th edition of The Globe 100, our annual ranking of Massachusetts companies, change, rather than continuity, is what stands out.

Of the 25 companies that topped our list in 1989, the maiden issue of The Globe 100, only seven still exist as publicly traded Massachusetts companies. That's an attrition rate of 72 percent.

A few of the departed companies failed. Many more were gobbled up in consolidations, in which big fish routinely swallow smaller fish. Massachusetts has lost more banks, for instance, than many countries had to begin with.

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And then there are the companies that have hung around, such as State Street, TJX, Gillette, Raytheon, Reebok, and EMC. They have survived, and frequently thrived. How does one explain why they are still around, when so many others are not? More importantly, does their success hold any lessons for the rest of us?

The Globe 100 is the business equivalent of a beauty contest. We evaluate the entrants in a variety of categories — return on equity, change in revenue, and change in profit margin — and then calculate a composite score. Standard & Poor's Compustat crunched the numbers for us.

Our categories are designed to encompass the qualities that make for a successful company. To qualify, a company must be publicly traded and be based in Massachusetts, and profitable for the past two years.

A review of the first 15 years of The Globe 100 gives an armchair historian a close-up look at the process of creative destruction. Companies appear and disappear, and new ones show up. Some of those no longer with us were terrific companies, in their day. Digital Equipment Corp. was once the world's second-biggest computer company, after IBM. Bank of Boston was a fixture for more than 200 years. In the 1980s, Lotus Development pioneered a new industry called software.

Digital was acquired by Compaq, which in turn was acquired by Hewlett-Packard. Bank of Boston was acquired by Fleet. Lotus became part of IBM. In technology, companies that missed the wave in computing often didn't stick around to compete in the next round. In banking, companies that weren't quite big enough lost out in the Darwinian process of consolidation. In retailing, Bay State companies were supplanted by bigger, more aggressive national competitors.

What separates the survivors from the rest of the pack?

Consultants have been trying to answer that question forever. Classic business books such as "In Search of Excellence" and "Built to Last" were attempts to find the qualities that surviving companies possess. As for Massachusetts companies, success seems to have been the result of good vision, good execution, good deal-making, and a healthy blend of good luck.

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Take State Street, for example. More than 25 years ago, its leader, William Edgerly, took State Street out of the banking business and repositioned it as a giant back office for the mutual fund and pension industries. It was a great call, on two fronts: Banking suffered through some brutal ups and downs, while mutual funds exploded.

"State Street wound up in a sweet spot," said Thomas Finucane, who follows finance for State Street Research (no relation to State Street Corp.)

Fleet survived the banking wars, and given its roots as a modest-size Rhode Island bank, there was no guarantee it would.

"Terry Murray [the former chief executive] took this little bank from Providence and turned it into one of the largest banks in the United States," said Gerard Cassidy, an analyst with RBC Capital Markets.

Murray was a consummate deal-maker, and he pulled off more mergers and better mergers than the competition. Because Fleet had less exposure to the New England economy, it came through the disastrous downturn of the early 1990s in much better shape than its rivals.

Was that luck or foresight? You make the call.

TJX, based in Framingham, pulled off a great merger in 1995 when it bought Marshalls, the discount department store. The business cemetery is filled with failed discounters, including local entries such as Caldor and Bradlees. Marshalls has put together the blend of low prices and quality merchandise thAt consumers want. That blend has allowed TJX to prosper, even in the slow economy of the past few years.

EMC created a better mousetrap. The Hopkinton company was a flyspeck of a business ($123 million in sales) when we published the first Globe 100. But EMC developed a system of storing computer data that became the industry's gold standard. In 2000, EMC's sales reached $8.8 billion. The computer slump has cut those sales sharply. EMC's stock price has dropped from $100 a share to about $9.

Still, consider this: If you had invested a dollar in EMC stock in 1989, it would be worth more than $100 today.

Finally, there is Reebok. In the 1980s and early 1990s, Reebok had the cool sneakers everyone wanted. Then Nike came along and took over the cool market. Reebok wandered in the wilderness for a long time.

In early 2000, its stock sold for $7 a share. Since then, the stock has quadrupled, despite a miserable stock market. By hooking up with basketball star Allen Iverson, Reebok got its cool back and regained some of its past glory.

As James Collins and Jerry Porras wrote in "Built To Last," "Visionary companies display a resilience, an ability to bounce back from adversity."

There's plenty of adversity out there today: a sluggish economy, deflation, SARS, terrorism, and intense global competition.

Some of these forces will claim victims in Massachusetts. Not every company on our list this year will be back next year.

But if history is a guide, some of the best will find a way to survive, and new ones will crop up to replace the departed.

As long as the creative part of creative destruction keeps working, we should come out all right in the end.

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Charles Stein is a Globe columnist

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Posted on Tue, Dec. 03, 2002 U.S. depository libraries change SIXTY PERCENT OF NEW TITLES NOW AVAILABLE ONLINE By Shawn Neidorf Mercury News   If you like solitude, you would love a ``federal depository library,'' a library that stocks government documents from the mundane to the obscure. Stroll down the aisles, past decades of the Congressional Record. Thumb through NASA's ``Technical Report No. 32-990, The Mars 1964-1965 Apparition.'' In another aisle, pick up ``The Holy Koran in the Library of Congress,'' a 449-page listing of every Koran translation and Koran-related material held there. The only sound you'd probably hear would be your own heels clicking on the shiny tile. It's not that students, teachers and data-oriented members of the general public have forsaken research, it's that they've turned to the Internet for most of it. That makes for a radical change in how people seek information that was once found only in the books and binders that fill depository library shelves. It's an equally radical shift for librarians, who spend less time helping visitors and more time cataloging materials online, so patrons they will never see can retrieve data and documents online. The shift in how information is collected and used brings opportunities and challenges to researchers and librarians. The Government Printing Office, which provides the documents sent to depository libraries, has been shifting since the mid-1990s to electronic distribution. About 60 percent of its new titles are now available online, said Andy Sherman, a GPO spokesman. ``I don't get as many people in the door,'' said George Carlson, who oversees government documents at Santa Clara University's library. The school hosts one of 1,300 depository libraries nationwide that collect U.S. documents from the Government Printing Office and preserve them for public use. Other area colleges and universities also are depositories, as is the Redwood City Public Library and the San Francisco Public Library. More democratic The shift to electronic documents saves precious shelf space and lets patrons get at the information anytime from anywhere they can log onto the Internet. That's more democratic, said Yvonne Chen, director of the Redwood City Public Library, herself a former government-documents librarian. And online keyword searches are faster and easier than having to identify a document and search for it in the library, she said. Return To Top   But there are drawbacks. ``If people are helping themselves to this stuff online, I don't know if they are getting what they really are after, or whether they are willing to just take what's there,'' said Santa Clara University's Carlson. He worries that online searchers aren't seeing the explanations and disclaimers that go with the spreadsheets of statistics, the kind of thing librarians point out to in-person patrons. And although an online search makes it easier to pinpoint information, it arrives on the screen shorn of the context it would have in a larger report or book. The better-targeted a query is, the less likely the searcher is to have the serendipitous experience of finding more than he was seeking. Challenge for librarians That's common with a book or paper document, where related information surrounds the data, said Lance Strate, an associate professor of communications and media studies at Fordham University and president of the Media Ecology Association. For librarians charged with archiving the nation's history, online documents present a major -- and largely unanswered -- question: how to store them for perpetuity. How will researchers get at 2002's electronic documents in 2102, given how much technology is likely to change by then? It's a crucial question for George Barnum, electronic collection manager for the Government Printing Office. Most of the data he works with is in the common formats of html or hypertext markup language, the common language of the Web, and .pdf or portable document format, a format that allows documents to retain their original graphical elements. He stores information he thinks future data retrievers will need to open documents in XML format, attached to each file. XML, or extensible markup language, a system for creating classes of data and defining the relationships between those classes. ``What you aim to do is, over time, to keep the information, the content, in spite of the application that it takes to render it.'' Return To Top   ``I've been in on a lot of discussions and a lot of planning where we look at horizons of 10 to 100 years, but that's just a modeling technique,'' Barnum says, ``the idea being if we can keep a digital publication or a digital object alive from 10 to 100 years, we can probably keep it alive forever.'' Quiet place to study In the bunker-like underground documents library at Stanford University, Amit Patel, a sophomore in international relations, sat alone at a table, drawing neat triangles in his notebook. He didn't come to the documents library to look anything up, but to study for an economics exam. He came for the quiet; few students use the stacks surrounding him. Patel says he does most of his research online. When he is uncertain of the methodology or credibility of a data source he uses, he discloses those limitations in his paper. He prefers secondary sources that cite statistics -- and come with analysis -- over the original statistics themselves. And only for major papers will he go beyond the Internet to find paper documents. In the bunker-like underground documents library at Stanford University, Ann Cho settled in to search the shelves for labor documents. The junior economics major needed to find the wages of female telegraph workers in the late 19th century. For information that old, students need paper records. Mike Wynne, a Santa Clara sophomore studying philosophy says he retains what he learns better from paper materials. ``It's tangible.'' Wynne said he has his doubts about Internet-discovered data: ``For some reason, I don't feel it's as legitimate.'' Contact Shawn Neidorf at sneidorf@sjmercury.com or (650) 688-7550.   Return To Top

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From the Workplace to the Classroom:
Innovation, Reform, and Resistance in the Communication Age

Mark Warschauer - University of Hawai'i
markw@hawaii.edu, http://www.lll.hawaii.edu/markw

Efforts at educational and technological reform in the classroom mirror changes taking place elsewhere in society, especially in the workplace. In this paper, I first examine the overall socio-economic framework which is shaping technological reform. I then discuss and compare research which has been conducted on the impact of new technologies in the workplace and in the classroom.

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Economic Change, Work, and Education

The nature of work and education has changed dramatically in the last 200 years. We can examine this period in three eras: the agricultural era, industrial era, and informational era. During the agricultural era (until the late 19th century in the United States), the majority of the population worked on farms. Little formal education was required, as farming was learned through personal apprenticeship. Education, which focused on rote learning, oral recitation, imitation of "correct" speech and writing, and memorization, served to enforce the aristocratic mores of society (de Castell & Luke, 1986).

During the industrial era (from the early 20th century until about the 1970s in the U.S.), the majority of people worked in manufacturing. Factories were organized according to a Fordist model of a strict vertical hierarchies, minute divisions of labor, and individual compartmentalized skills. Schools too came to be influenced by the same model, with students learning decontextualized functional sub-skills through programmed instruction in large classes (de Castell & Luke, 1986).

In the informational era (from about the 1970s in the U.S.), increases in productivity depend on the use of science and technology to manage the quality of information (Castells, 1996). The archetypal workplace is the office, and work is increasingly organized on post-Fordist principals of horizontal networks, teamwork, a flexible division of labor, and just-in-time production and distribution (Gee, Hull, & Lankshear, 1996). Informationalism requires a new learning mode emphasizing collaborative inquiry and systems thinking (Reich, 1991).

Thus both schools and workplaces need to reorganize to reflect more effectively the imperatives of today's society. And both need to make effective use of technologies as part of this reform process. This becomes complicated, however, by the changing role of technology from the industrial to the informational era. Previously technology served principally to automate (remove processes from human control); today, though, technology also serves to informate (Zuboff, 1988), that is, to provide a deeper level of information to a broader array of people (thus to give people more control).

Technology-Based Reform in the Workplace

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Zuboff (1988) studied eight companies (in factories, mills, and offices) for five years to determine the impact of new "informating" technologies on work relations. She found that companies that did not reform their organizational structure in correspondence to the power of new technologies suffered serious problems, as workers, once they had access to more information, insisted as well on having more power and control. As Zuboff explains, "the informating process sets knowledge and authority on a collision course" (p. 310).

Kling and Zmuidzinas (1994) postulated four types of transformation that the infusion of computer technology could bring about in a company: metamorphoses (abrupt change to a new paradigm of social organization), migration (gradual shift in the direction of a new type of organization), elaboration/reinforcement (strengthening of an existing organizational paradigm), and stability (no change). They then studied 40 companies over a three-year period to see the actual impact of new technologies. The results were about evenly divided between migration, elaboration/reinforcement, and stability, with no cases found of metamorphoses. According to their research, there were five factors which affected which kinds of change took place: managerial ideologies, the strategies adopted for implementing reform, the social organization of work groups, the occupational power of work groups, and the degree of integration of technology.

Technology-Based Reform in the Schools

Researchers on technology and school reform have found almost the exact same phenomena. Cuban (1986) conducted a review of 100-years of technology-based reform involving film, radio, and television. He found that new technologies were often heralded as being revolutionary in impact, but were implemented in a top-down fashion and only effected education marginally.

Sandholtz, Ringstaff, and Dwyer (1997) conducted a ten-year study of computer technology in five schools. They found that computer technologies did have a big effect in situations where schools and teachers were able to implement broader innovations, including student-centered learning and team-teaching. This entailed a lengthy process of teachers working together to develop new beliefs and attitudes toward how students learned. Teachers who maintained traditional beliefs found the changes frustrating and reverted to lecture-style teaching; they encountered resistance though from students who were used to student-centered approaches.

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I found similar results in a two-year ethnographic study of four computer-intensive language and writing classes in three colleges in Hawai'i (Warschauer, 1997). Teachers implemented uses of technology that were consistent with and reinforced their own approach to the teaching of language and writing. For the three teachers who were in favor of student-centered learning, the transition to using computers went fairly smoothly. The teacher who had a more structural approach, emphasizing discipline and control in the writing process and classroom, had more difficulties in integrating new technologies, as students resented using computers for non-communicative structural work and exercises. This was another example of informating technologies failing when not accompanied by empowering processes.

In summary, new technologies can contribute to making schools better prepared for the age of information, but only if they are introduced along with broader reforms of social organization. Steps that can help in the introduction of technology-based reform include (1) a focus on broad educational goals, rather than technical issues; (2) an examination of the overall educational context which shapes how technology is used (including how testing is carried out, how much time teachers have for planning, etc.); (3) an emphasis on taking into account teachers beliefs (and working teachers with teachers to examine and develop their beliefs); (4) an emphasis on full integration of technology with the curriculum and teaching goals (rather than seeing technology as an add-on); and (5) efforts to build broad social support for change through the inclusion of technical support, release time for teachers, ongoing training, and professional reward for effective use of technology.

The infusion of computers will not turn a bad school, or a bad company, into a good one. But computers can play a very important role in workplaces and schools which are willing to engage in necessary reform.

References

Castells M, The rise of the network society (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1996)

Cuban L, Teachers and machines: The classroom use of technology since 1920 (New York: Teachers College Press, 1986)

de Castell S, & A Luke, 'Models of literacy in North American schools: Social and historical conditions and consequences' in S de Castell, A Luke, & K Egan (Eds.), Literacy, society, and schooling: 87-109 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986)

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Gee J P, G Hull, & C Lankshear, The new work order: Behind the language of new capitalism (St. Leonards, Australia: Allen & Unwin, 1996)

Kling R, & Zmuidzinas 'Technology, ideology and social transformation: The case of computerization and work organization' Revue International de Sociologie, 2: 28-56 (1994)

Reich R, The work of nations: Preparing ourselves for 21st century capitalism (New York: Knopf, 1991)

Sandholtz J H, C Ringstaff & D C Dwyer, Teaching with technology: Creating student-centered classrooms (New York: Teachers College Press, 1997)

Warschauer M, Electronic literacies: Language, culture, and power in online education Manuscript submitted for publication (1997)

Zuboff S, In the age of the smart machine: The future of work and power (Basic Books: New York, 1988)

 

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[Karl Note:  I found this article to be interesting, even convincing, until I thought about it further. There is something more basic than the examples of cultural levels presented here.

Much more basic is the difference in "awareness levels" among these same groups. The difference in awareness level translates, also, to differences in morality -- with "morality" defined to mean "behavior that promotes the optimum survival of the group, generally 'mankind' if you want an expansive view."

This is presented further in a Policy I've written here.]

Cultural Change The next one		Josep Burcet © 2002
		Spanish version Catalan version

 

The coming change Between 2010 and 2025 the conditions for a big cultural change will be met. This will happen as a result of the current communication revolution. The magnitude of cultural change is proportional to the amount of communication increase (se the quantum leap communication hypothesis) . So, a big increment in communication flows will produce big cultural changes .  But as far as the communication revolution is unfolding very quickly, cultural impacts will happen very quickly too. In consequence, after 2010 we may expect that humankind will need to absorb a huge amount of novelty in a very short period of time. Meanwhile, the vast majority of  people may not be able to handle it.  The ability to cope with a very large novelty intake depends on some individual characteristics, but mainly i) on the culture people use and ii) the social framework where people live in. Cultural and economic environment may facilitate changes or, conversely, may hamper them. So we may distinguish cultures depending on their ability to facilitate change and novelty intake. On the basis of cultural changes occurred during the last 25 years, let's consider four different types of culture. Return To Top   Type   People living within these cultural regions remain using their traditional way of life. They live the same way their ancestors did 1000 years ago.  Type  Those cultures allow some changes but they happen very slowly. Usually, they correspond to pre-industrial societies. Type  Change has taken place even if some important cultural elements still evolve slowly. Generally speaking, societies in transition to industrialization have this type of cultures. Type  This kind of cultures have allowed notable changes during the last 25 years. They correspond to confirmed industrial societies and, mainly, the post-industrial ones. It is important to underlay that different speed in the novelty intake produces growing distances between cultural regions. And distances generate tensions. From now on, those tensions are going to grow.  PROSPECTS FOR CULTURAL CHANGE Cultures from more dynamic societies (type 4) will substantially increase their ability to handle novelty even if novelty will raise quicker than the capacity to cope with. This may produce  i) a digital divide and ii) several forms of congestion among their populations. Cultures belonging to regions in development (type 3), will also evolve but at a lower rate. Some privileged individuals will cope with the novelty overload, but the whole social system will not. As a  consequence, the gap between the rise of novelty and the ability of their populations to cope with it, will grow. Return To Top   In the case of less dynamic cultures (type 2 and type 1) the prospect is worse. Here again, some individuals could face the rise of novelty but social systems will remain very far away from what it would be required.  Novelty evolution Culture 4 ability to allow novelty intake Culture 3 ability to allow novelty intake Culture 2 ability to allow novelty intake Culture 1 ability to allow novelty intake The ability to handle novelty progresses slower than the rise of novelty, regardless the type of culture.   Difficulties for facilitating change are related to the relationship that everyone maintains with its own culture (see ' The unbending process '). CONCLUSIONS Return To Top   The first conclusion lies on the danger of very serious tensions between different cultural areas. Until now, we have managed intercultural tensions with more or less success. Nevertheless, current tensions could only be a small scale prelude of what we are going to face in the near future.  In the years to come, the magnitude of intercultural clash may result from:  i) unsustainable migratory pressures upon the more advanced regions, ii) quick proliferation of bitter forms of international activism and terrorism and perhaps iii) some forms of civilization confrontations.  The second conclusion is related to the tensions within every cultural region.  Return To Top   In the most advanced regions it will appear what we could call  ' the different speed citizens phenomena '.  This will be enhanced by: several forms of digital divide, ( see The digital fracture ) the fast increase of recent arrived immigrants, the quick growth of several forms of past-oriented social segments, which will be virulent and might result from novelty overload, particularly among certain types of people.  In the case of domestic tensions in the other cultural regions (type 1, 2 and 3) they will be of the same kind of those occurred in the more advanced regions, except  those linked to immigration. The cultural shock  in the fastest type 3 developing regions will be severe. In the more slow ones, the gap with the more advanced cultures will be extremely harmful. Return To Top   The combined effect of international and domestic tensions and their astonishing magnitude draws a nightmare scenario, specially by the end of the current decade and afterwards.   All those problems appear to be related to the inability of current cultures in order to manage i) the rise of novelty and ii) the coming intercultural struggles. Populations need more effective patterns of behavior, renewed cognitive structures and better motivations in order to increase their ability to face the years to come. The main conclusion is that we need  to make our cultures to evolve. It must be done quickly, towards any direction  able enough to enhance our ability to stimulate change and, at the same time, to assimilate it. Return To Top    GENERAL MOBILIZATION SCENARIO In this scenario, between 2002 and 2004 a debate on cultural change starts all over the World. Many persons and organizations become involved. Between 2005 and 2010, the failure of current cultures to manage the new emergent problems becomes obvious and the time for action will have come.  Return To Top   From the 2010 perspective it will become evident that the pacific cohabitation of different World populations will not be reached by the means of candid pacifistic attitudes, dualistic explanations (the good and the evil) or mere altruistic initiatives.  All these may help to deal with some superficial problems but has no helpful effect on the deepest culture layers, from where the precursors of the conflicts come. On the other hand, violence will not be considered as the indefinite solution aiming at solving problems, satisfying needs, controlling conflicts and facilitating cohabitation.  As a result, a kind of general emergency state takes place and several large projects of culture transformation  start  everywhere. Pages for the XXI

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