Back in the days of feudal capitalism, running a company like IBM was a far simpler proposition than it is today. Remember the blue suits? IBM used to be famous for its strong corporate culture, so impressed on everyone who worked there that the blue suit became the de facto uniform of the workforce. Everyone knew when Big Blue walked into the room. Their suits stood out as strongly as a coat of arms draped on the backs of a medieval lord's archer brigade. If you worked at IBM, you knew what armor to put on every morning. Enforcing a companywide point of view was easier when the old fortress mentality still held sway. You could communicate policies, values, rules, goals, and perspectives to your workforce through vertical channels. You could post notices, hold meetings, and have retreats for managers, and your messages—explicit and implicit—would travel their way throughout the workforce. Strategies would shift in lockstep, and blue suits would be worn. Both corporation and employee benefited from this way of operating; orders were given and everyone knew where to march.

Few businesses have fortress walls that shield and contain their workforce anymore, especially the larger ones. Communication technology has replaced the concept of workforce with an array of laborers affiliated in myriad, open relationships. Full-time employees work hand in hand with members of joint ventures, colleagues in independently managed subsidiaries, on-site independent contractors, remote representatives of outsourcing companies, consultants working from their homes, and as many more creative interrelationships as you can imagine. Add to that a global supply and distribution chain and you get an organic tangle of human relationships difficult to easily control.

In place of the nice, tidy company-as-city-state, the population of corporations more closely resembles a Central American rainforest. Tall, old-growth trees define the greater geography while vines twist this way and that, connecting one tree to another, to a bush, to the ground. Lichen and moss grow in patches everywhere, often on top of one another. Bushes, fungi, saplings, and parasites abound. Flowers sprout, often in unpredictable places, as countless species of birds, bugs, and animals find a home in its dark, fertile recesses. The forest has subsumed the stone fortress of businesses, leaving in its place an organic ecosystem filled with possibility. Not only don't your co-workers wear the blue suits, but some, who work from the privacy of their homes, work in pajamas. Traditional ways of categorizing people have gone away, along with the traditional ways of reaching out and communicating organizational goals and values to them. Few give or receive inflexible marching orders; many more of us must navigate day to day on our own. The workforce has become an ecosystem comprised of mutually reinforcing independent agents. An ecosystem, by definition, interacts or it does not survive. To thrive in a business ecosystem, you must be able connect with those in it—one way or another—as never before.

Returning to our organization-as-stadium metaphor, a Wave must work with everybody in the stadium. Full-time employees are like season ticket holders, with a significant investment in the success of the team, and that stake might be sufficient motivation for them to participate in your Wave. Others—consultants or on-site contractors, say—might completely depend on what you pay them, and they, too, might stand up when you ask. But there are many people, five rows down, who do not and will not. They depend on other things. Some came just for this one game. They might have a lesser stake, or even competing interests. Some might be cheering for the visiting team. They can all stop your Wave. If all non-season ticket holders refused to get up with your Wave, you might be left standing and raising your arms alone.

Organizations have always been constituted of complicated interrelationships of mutual interest. Today, however, we have both thinner and thicker bonds with our various shareholders, stakeholders, and partners. They are thinner because the diverse types of relationship and connection we form with suppliers, freelancers, part-timers, outsourcers, free agents, and cooperative partners are no longer strong enough on their own to impel total cooperation. They are thicker in the degree to which we now may depend on these bonds to achieve critical goals. Despite newly complicated and quickly evolving relationships, we still need to reach out and connect with our related communities in a way that can unite us in a common goal, to make a Wave powerful enough to sweep up and unite the many competing interests in play.

Business in the information age is complicated not only by the myriad new forms of relationship upon which it is built, but also by the increasing remoteness of those with whom we build it. The philosopher David Hume once said that the moral imagination diminishes with distance.^[14] By this he meant you don't feel the same sense of connection or obligation to someone halfway across the world that you do to someone halfway across the room, halfway across town, or even halfway across the country. In fact, our personal survival systems depend on not feeling implicated with things that are far away. Doctors, for instance, do not drive around randomly from county to county treating people. They say, "My responsibilities extend to this hospital, and over there is another doctor's responsibilities." A person in Senegal lives so far away from most of us that we can think of him in the abstract and believe we do not need to feel responsible to an abstraction. This is the logic, if you can call it that, behind Joseph Stalin's horrible formulation, "A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic."

For centuries, local proximity determined the majority of our social functions, containing us in relatively homogenous environments. We dealt on a day-to-day basis with people with whom we generally shared a common culture and therefore understood easily the behaviors and signals that occurred in the spaces between us. Global connectivity sets that whole idea on its ear. We now find ourselves in a world where we are thrust together in all aspects of our lives without borders and without the homogenizing pressures of locality. The fiber-optic strands that enmesh us pierce the protective membranes of local culture like needles popping soap bubbles. They create a whole new set of interrelationship challenges. From purchasing items from a seller on eBay to online dating to video chats with team members halfway around the world, at any time you might find yourself interacting with people with whom you have never before broken bread, who don't necessarily speak the same language you do, who don't necessarily recognize your patterns of behavior, and vice versa. That guy in Senegal? Your company just bought the Internet start-up for which he works and folded him into your business unit. You will now manage him and his team in Dakar remotely.

Before all information became zeros and ones, our lives moved at a slower pace. We had more time to get to know each other and the luxury to value personal contact in nearly all our dealings. Now, multinational companies commonly form teams of employees chosen from various divisions, various countries, and various cultures. Global supply chains and international customer bases multiply and mutate faster than a flu virus. Mergers and acquisitions fuel growth and value creation with little regard to how the individuals involved will interrelate each day. We often build our business relationships in a collage-like construct of flyby hotel meetings, video chats, cell calls, e-mails, and faxes. While I was editing this chapter, one of my researchers working across town instant messaged me about a file she was looking for, and I was able to drag-and-drop it to her faster than if she had been working across the hall. We take such things for granted.

Opportunity conjoins us faster than we have developed frameworks for understanding each other and getting along. Distance no longer separates us; new communications capabilities render distance irrelevant by connecting us instantly. In this proximal world, the opportunities for misunderstandings abound. How do you write an e-mail to someone if you can't tell from their e-mail address if they are a man or a woman, what country they are from, what upbringing they had, or if they believe cows to be sacred or just lunch? In the United States, if two managers of different seniority find themselves in conflict they are most likely to approach each other directly and communicate frankly to try to resolve the issue. In Indonesia, the direct approach will only make it worse. In Jakarta, the concept of asal bapak senang, keeping the boss happy, comes into play.^[15] Indonesian subordinates typically feel personally responsible for solving problems without notifying their superiors, even if it means lying about a situation rather than addressing it directly.

Dr. Fons Trompenaars and Charles Hampden-Turner, authors of Building Cross-Cultural Competence, conducted a worldwide study of cultural attitudes that revealed startling differences among the countries now commonly linked in global enterprise. They posed the following problem to workers in dozens of countries in order to better understand cultural dispositions toward loyalty and regulation:

Before you read the results, take a moment to think how you would respond.

In countries with a strong Protestant tradition and stable democracies, like the United States, Switzerland, Sweden, and Australia, nearly 80 percent thought the friend had "no" or only "some" right to expect help, and would choose to tell the truth in court. In South Korea and Yugoslavia, fewer than 20 percent felt this way; 80 percent felt that helping their friend was the right thing to do. "When we posed this question in Japan," Hampden-Turner told me when we spoke, "the Japanese said this was a difficult problem, and they wanted to leave the room. I thought this was an unusual way for people to answer the question, but let them leave the room to discuss it. They came back in 25 minutes and said the correct answer is to say to your friend, 'I will stick with you; I will give any version of events that you ask me to, but I ask you to find in our friendship the courage that allows us to tell the truth.' I thought this was a wonderful solution. They wanted to be universalistic—to tell the absolute truth, a characteristic of the Western world—but their culture is particularistic and values the love and loyalty to a particular friend. They made the move from one to the other, but approached it from the opposite direction than a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant would."^[17]

Complicating these differences in perception is the concurrent tendency of each culture to view negatively the values of the other. A Swiss person might tend to distrust a South Korean because, in the Swiss person's view, Koreans don't respect authority, and that Korean might in turn disrespect the Swiss believing that they do not sufficiently value friendship and loyalty. How does that bode for your ability to communicate to the wide variety of people throughout your global supply chain or on an e-mail distribution list? How about a company trying to disseminate and acculturate a uniform code of conduct throughout its global organization? How do you get people to do the Wave if, at a foundational level, they either mistrust or don't understand your values?

When software development company Lotus sought to expand its well-known business collaboration products—Notes and Domino—to support a global user base, it ran headfirst into these questions. To extend its "global virtual watercooler" to successfully interface with business in Japan, for example, it designed a space within the software for users to share the extensive social pleasantries that Japanese culture demands prior to doing business.^[18] Bridging these gaps can be a mind-boggling task. Imagine how many different options it would take to accommodate the bridging requirements between every possible pair of cultures, and then remember that a single group meeting on a project might involve representatives of four or five different cultures.

Business is an ecosystem, distance no longer keeps us apart, the ties that bind us are looser than ever, and there is a new us whose members change almost daily; and it is all made possible because electronic communication fills the synapses between us. Electronic communication is both a boon and a bane. It makes these new, powerful networks of collaboration possible, but does so in a strange and fractured language.

What separates humans from other creatures is our uniquely complex ability to create symbols. Symbols allow us to understand the world, and are the primary means by which we create social and psychological relationships. Human interaction is a symphony of symbolic gestures of which language is just a small part. Physicality, intonation, facial expression, volume, and body language play an important role in our ability to interrelate and understand the intention behind the words we use. In the days before electric communication (telegraph and telephone), the majority of our communication took place face-to-face. We were generally able to look someone in the eye and interpret what he or she was telling us. Over the past 75 years or so, technology systematically removed many of these interpersonal behavioral cues from our dominant modes of interaction. First the telegraph and then the telephone allowed us to hook up more easily—but only partly, as many symbolic social cues were missing. The slower pace of change characteristic of the industrial age, however, gave us time to adapt to these new modes of communication and to develop the new symbol decoding ability they demanded of us. Still, we never came to fully trust them. The unwritten rule was that much could be accomplished on the telephone, but when it came down to really important communications, nothing beat looking someone in the eye and shaking that person's hand.

Step back for a moment and think about the myriad and fantastic ways business communicates in the twenty-first century: e-mail, instant messaging, cell phones, personal digital assistants (PDAs), text messages. Each mediates our message in subtly different ways, distorting some parts, magnifying and diminishing others. Each technology works like a filter allowing some symbols to pass through and others to be left behind. Now think about how fast these changes have come upon us. E-mail, as strange as it is to think now, has been with most of us for around a decade. In the mid-1990's, some of us wore numeric pagers, and if we even had a cell phone, it was often larger than this book.

When we communicate electronically, we communicate less dynamically, with less give-and-take. Electronic communication tends to be unidirectional and sequential. When it does overlap, like in an instant message chat, it often ceases to make sense:

Though we now work more cooperatively, like pieces on a chessboard, the electronic communication that passes between us is a game of incomplete information, more like poker than chess. In chess, both players can see complete information about the game. In poker, you can only see the cards that are face up. But unlike poker, the goal of most of our communication is not to confuse our opponent but rather to be clear with our partner; we want, to varying degrees, to put our cards on the table. It's the paradox of the information age: Technology connects us more than ever before but those connections are more fractured and incomplete than we are accustomed to. Missing are many of the clues we need to fully decode the intentions of others.

Another pressure of instant communication could be called the Expectation of Response Factor. In the industrial age, we wrote letters deliberately, knowing that even if we dashed off a quick note from point A it would take its own sweet postal time to arrive at point B. The recipient, in turn, could take a commensurate amount of time crafting a response. The pace of information flow allowed enough time for even time-sensitive writing to receive a modicum of consideration before being sent. Not so with the various gizmos and gadgets we now find strapped to our belts or planted on our desks. Messages appear instantly, implicitly insisting on a quick response. The Expectation of Response Factor exerts an influence on the quality of our communication, often forcing us to respond in less considered ways. In media whose nature transmits only parts of our intended symbols at best, the virtual ticking of the electronic clock cheats us of the time we need for careful or meaningful expression.

In the olden days (before about 1995), when people wanted to buy, say, a toaster, they would pick a local store known for its good selection or good pricing of small appliances and buy the one that seemed best for their needs. If they were particularly industrious, thrifty, or enamored of the process, they might call or visit two or three stores before making their purchase, dig out back issues of consumers testing magazines, or consult a catalog or two to compare price and features. As more businesses went online, people suddenly had the ability to shop not only within their local area, but almost anywhere. Large and trusted online retailers were added to the shopping mix, giving consumers a few more options if they wished to pursue them. Between June 2004 and March 2005, however, as e-commerce began exploding worldwide, people who bought online suddenly became more prone to visiting 10 or more web sites before returning to a favored location hours or days later to make a purchase.^[19]

It has been said that information is like a toddler: It goes everywhere, gets into everything, and you can't always control it.^[20] Someone should have told that to David Edmondson, former CEO of RadioShack. For consumers, easy access to information about vendors has become an advantage; for those like Edmondson, who had something to hide, it has meant devastation. When he joined RadioShack in 1994, Edmondson invented a couple of lines for his resume in the form of college degrees in theology and psychology from Pacific Coast Baptist College in California that he never earned. In February 2006, after just eight months at the top of his profession, he was forced to resign. Though the school had relocated to Oklahoma and renamed itself, a reporter from the Fort Worth Star-Telegram tracked it down and uncovered the discrepancies. Edmondson's career, built on the foundation of these lies, lay in pieces at his feet.^[21]

He's not alone, of course. The news is full of examples of the mighty who have taken the fall. Kenneth Lonchar, former CFO and EVP of Silicon Valley software storage firm Veritas (the Latin word for truth), got caught in 2002 claiming a false Stanford MBA.^[22] University of Notre Dame head football coach George O'Leary resigned when it was revealed that he had not only lied on his resume about playing football at his alma mater, but he had also falsely claimed a master's degree.^[23] Even Jeff Taylor, founder of online job-search company Monster.com, posted on his own web site an executive biography touting a phony Harvard MBA.^[24]

We live in the age of transparency. In 1994, it might have been easy to get away with such shenanigans, but with the massive shift of personal records and personal profiles to databases easily accessed over the Internet, virtually everything about you can be discovered quite easily. The fact that The New Oxford American Dictionary lists "Google" as a verb makes this perfectly clear, as does the sample sentence it uses to illuminate its meaning: "You meet someone, swap numbers, fix a date, and then Google them through 1,346,966,000 Web pages."^[25] The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette recently reported a Harris Interactive poll showing that 23 percent of people routinely search the names of business associates or colleagues on the Internet before meeting them.^[26] The DontDateHimGirl.com web site allows a woman to post the name and photograph of a man she says has wronged her. As the web site's founder, Tasha C. Joseph, told the New York Times, "It's like a dating credit report" for women.^[27] Anyone with a video camera can share with the world your worst moments by posting them on YouTube.com, a revolution that within just a couple of years of its launch has had a dramatic effect on politics, entertainment, law enforcement, music, and countless people's private lives. Political pollsters can compare your age, income, party registration, type of car you own, charities you donate to, and a glut of other readily available personal information to predict with a very high degree of accuracy how you will vote.^[28]

These facts exert a profound influence on business. Before transparency allowed them to peer through the tall trees, outside observers could discern the outline of a forest, but thought little about what was growing beneath. Companies, for instance, could form a joint venture to protect themselves from the ramifications of a dubious enterprise, believing that if the unit got into trouble it would not hurt the reputation of the parent company. In a transparent world, however, when your joint venture transgresses, everybody knows who owns it. In the past, training its managers in proper conduct was sufficient to protect a company's reputation because line employees had little contact with the outside world and rarely got a company into trouble. Now, any employee can say something about a company in a chat room or in a blog and the next day it might appear on DrudgeReport or The Smoking Gun. There's even a new word for it—whistleblogging—when employees create personal online journals to report company wrongdoing. The new transparency doesn't allow you to hide in the dark underbrush, to have a joint venture here, or hire an agent there. Observers can easily tell the trees from the forest.

An information society also breeds a surveillance society. People are more curious and they look a lot more. They look because it is suddenly easy to do so; looking costs little, requires even less effort, and pays off with everything from the best prices for goods and services to revelations of the unsavory. Around the world, viewers are glued to their television sets by "reality TV," programming that purports to give true glimpses of private lives (the United States now has a whole network dedicated to it, and the British version of Celebrity Big Brother touched off an international incident^[29]). We've always been interested in what was happening next door, but now we can actually see it. It's like examining a drop of water under a microscope. When you first place the drop on the slide, it looks clear and pristine. But the microscope's lens reveals a hidden world. With each adjustment of the magnification you see organisms and objects that before you could only have imagined; what first appeared clear and unpolluted suddenly appears messy and complex. Microscope technology changes the way you look at water, and with your curiosity thus piqued, you can't help but wonder what worlds might exist within other familiar objects.

People look more often because the looking is easier and there has been more to find. Imagine the gratification of Heather Landy, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram staff writer who uncovered David Edmondson's embellished RadioShack resume. She began her investigation "into Edmondson's credentials after learning that the executive, who started two churches before making the transition to a full-time business career, [was] scheduled to go to court ... to fight his third drunken-driving charge."^[30] Corporate scandals, celebrity breakups, political corruption: Each day's news—delivered instantly via television, radio, web site, cell phone, RSS feed, and BlackBerry—exposes the transgressions of the icons of the age. Whether the media are addicted to it because they have so much bandwidth/airtime/column space to fill or we're hooked by our newfound access, in the information age, once we've gotten a taste of scandal we can't seem to get enough.

When Paul Chung hit the send button on an e-mail message to his friends, he sent a promising career in investment banking into a tailspin. The Carlyle Group had recently hired the 24-year-old Princeton graduate and relocated him to their Seoul, Korea office. Three days later, he used the company's network to boast to his buddies in New York about his lavish new lifestyle. "I know I was a stud in NYC," he wrote, "but I pretty much get about, on average, 5–8 phone numbers a night and at least 3 hot chicks that say they want to go home with me every night I go out." Later, he bragged about using one bedroom in the apartment his employer provided as his "harem" and another for sexual activities. Astounded recipients forwarded the message to thousands of people on Wall Street, until it finally ended up in his boss's in-box. Chung lost his job—and his reputation along with it.^[31] That was in 2001. Five years later, people are still talking about it. I googled "Paul Chung Carlyle," as his future employers and colleagues undoubtedly will, and found the story cited five times on the first page returned. It will follow him the rest of his life.

The brain forms and stores memories by building networks of neurons. Each network imprints and stores the millions of detailed impressions that make up a memory. The World Wide Web works exactly the same way. Its vast, interconnected database has a persistence of memory that will long outlive us. Even web sites that are pulled down or deleted live on forever on a site called Wayback Machine, which archives 55 billion web pages dating back to 1996.^[32] The persistence of memory in electronic form makes second chances harder to come by. Before the information revolution, a quack doctor could move to another town and hang out his shingle without fear of repercussion. Now, states keep instantly accessible databases detailing every charge and investigation lodged against him. The same holds true for companies, stores, and eBay sellers. In the information age, life has no chapters or closets; you can leave nothing behind and you have nowhere to hide your skeletons. Your past is your present, and it catches up with you like a truck backing over what it left behind.

It's not just smoking-gun e-mails like Chung's that get people into trouble in the information age. With the democratization of information, anyone can publish whatever they think at whatever time he or she thinks it, true or false. The standard of information verification has been lowered. In the mass media age of the 1980s and 1990s, large media companies still acted as the gatekeepers and watchdogs of public information. A professional class of journalists and editors vetted most claims and accusations for veracity before broadcasting them, applying a standard of independent proof and corroboration, or they paid the price for neglecting to do so. Information technology takes this responsibility out of the hands of trained professionals and places it in the hands of anyone with a keyboard. Any disgruntled employee can strike back. A dishonorable accuser with a false accusation can gain instant currency. As was prophetically said in a time before electronic communications (attributed to Mark Twain by some), "A lie can travel halfway round the world while the truth is putting on its shoes."^[33] Now, it can circle the earth numerous times in the time truth takes to simply think, "shoe." Reputations formerly carved in stone now seem easily besmirched by anyone with access to a keyboard. Accusations still uninvestigated gain as much currency as proven truth and, even if they are untrue, consume significant resources to defend against. Technology provides just about everyone the ability to quickly and cheaply compare and contrast reputations before making decisions. As reputation becomes more perishable, its value increases. As it becomes more accessible, it becomes a greater asset—and liability.

The free flow of information has irrevocably changed the ways we interrelate, both for the positive and the negative. According to a recent Pew study, for example, 40 percent of the 11 million people who use instant messaging at work feel it increases teamwork, but 32 percent say it encourages gossip, 29 percent say it has been distracting, and 11 percent say it has added stress to their lives.^[34] Unquestionably, communications technology has upended centuries of traditional practice, weakening the effectiveness of many habits that used to make us strong. It has changed the structure of how businesses operate and how people in businesses interoperate.

And we can't go back.

We will never become less connected. We will never become less transparent. The information jinni is out of the lamp and he's paying attention to no one's wishes. Tired of living in the dark recesses of a tarnished copper fixture, he's built himself a new house, one with transparent and permeable walls, framed by the new realities we've discussed in these two chapters: the destruction of the fortress, the flattening of the world, the rise of the business ecosystem, the fractured nature of virtual discourse, uncontrollable transparency, the destructive power of accusation, and the importance of reputation. With all these changes to the way we live, connect, and conduct our professional and personal lives, the questions become: How do we now thrive? How can we turn these challenges into strengths? We'll answer these questions in the chapters ahead, but first there are a few more important issues to consider: changes in what society values, trusts, and relies on for stability in times of uncertainty.