单项选择题

What Will We Do for Work
I believe that 90% of white-collar jobs in the U. S. will be either destroyed or altered beyond recognition in the next 10 to 15 years. That’s a catastrophic prediction, given that 90% of us are engaged in white-collar work of one sort or another. Even most manufacturing jobs these days are connected to such white-collar services as finance, human resources and engineering.
I talked to an old London loader some time back. He allowed that in 1970 it took 108 guys about five days to unload a timber ship. Then came containerization. The comparable task today takes eight folks one day. That is, a 98.5% reduction in man-days, from 540 total to just eight.
This time the productivity aims to reconstruct—make that deconstruct—the white-collar world. In fact, I see a five-sided movement that will bring to my apparently fantastic "90% in 10 years" prediction.
FIRST the Destructive Nature of the Current Flavor of Competition, Dotcom Company.
Sure, most will fail. But the survivors will exert enormous pressure—fast! —on the Big Guys. When an Amazon or a Charles Schwab moves into your neighborhood, you’ve got moments to react. Or take king entrepreneur Jim Clark of Netscape fame. His latest venture, Healtheon/WebMD, intends to squeeze hundreds of billions of dollars of waste out of the health-care system. These new firms aim to create nothing less than havoc in the theaters in which they operate.
SECOND Enterprise Software.
It’s a name for the tools that will hook up every aspect of a business’s innards’ internal organs—personnel, production, sales, accounting—and then hook up all that hooked-up stuff to the rest of the "family" of suppliers and the suppliers’ suppliers and wholesalers and retailers and end users.
They are your nightmare, these "white-collar robots." The complex products from German software giant SAP will do to your company’s internal organs exactly what robots and containerization did to the blue-collar world in 1960. Installing these tools is not easy. The technical part is distressing; the politics are dreadful. When the blue-collar robots arrived, the unions revolted against it. This time it’s management official who are opposing technological change. Why These tools threaten their comfortable status, carefully crafted over several generations.
But the robots did come. And they triumphed.
THIRD Outsourcing.
M. I. T.’s No. 1 computer professor, Michael Dertouzos, said India could easily boost its GDP by a trillion dollars in the next few years performing secret white-collar tasks for Western companies. He guessed that 50 million jobs from the white-collar West could go south to India, whose population hit 1 billion last week. The average annual salary for each of those 50 million new Indian workers: $20,000.
FOURTH the Web.
Ford, GM and DaimlerChrysler announce a rare combination. They will link all their tens of thousands of suppliers into a single, Internet-based network. This entity will include $250 billion annually of suppliers’ products(and perhaps an additional $500 billion of those suppliers’ products). In short, every penny of waste will be compressed from the huge procurement system. The order cycle will speed up dramatically. Medibuy aims for the same hat trick in medical supplies, Digital Think in training, Car Station in the auto-body-shop world. This is the white-hot world of B2B(business to business)electronic commerce, which will soon encompass trillions of dollars in transactions.
FIFTH Time Compression.
It took 37 years for the radio to get to 50 million homes. The Web got there in four. Hence my belief that while it took about a century to revolutionize blue-collar job practices, this brave new white-collar social system will be mostly installed in a tenth of that time—10 years.
Each of these five forces is fact, not image. Each influences the others multiplicatively. Therefore I am unwilling to withdraw my predictions about the power of the white-collar storm bearing down on us. Upsetting madness is in process. These forces are liberating. Blue-collar robots work out of factory and warehouse. The same will happen to white-collar work. My dad did it for 41 years at the Baltimore Gas & Electric Co. He was, sad to say, a white-collar indentured servant(契约佣工).
The world is going through more fundamental changes than it has in hundreds, perhaps thousands of years. The head economist Sandia National Laboratories, Arnold Baker, said it’s the "biggest change since the cavemen began bartering." Do you want to be player, a full-scale participant who embraces change Here is the opportunity to participate in the lovely, messy playground called "Let’s reinvent the world".
Here’s a new role model I call Icon Woman:
She is turned on by her work!
The work is cool!
She is an adventurer!
She is the CEO of her life!
My Icon Woman, of course, embraces and exploits the Web.
She submits her resume on the Web and keeps it perpetually active there.
She is recruited and negotiated and is hired on the Web.
She is trained on the Web.
She creates and conducts brilliant projects on the Web via a far-flung "virtual" stable of teammates (most of whom she’s never met).
She manages her career on the Web. And she has a personal website!
In approximately 2010, she will be at home, working—for the next several months—for Ford on a cruel difficult engineering problem. Her 79-member project team, only one of whom she’s met face-to-face (she considers face-to-face as a quaint idea), comes from 14 nations. Her fully wired home is her castle.
You maybe disprove. Is this "be wild and crazy and Webby and CEO of your own life" picture—anything other than New Age/new economy
I think it is relevant and real rather than wild and crazy—on at least two important scores.
One is that though my "house" is in Vermont, I’ve hung my professional license in Palo Alto since 1981. All is breaking loose "out there/here". These folks may sound weird, but they may also he redefining the world.
Two is back to the future! I constantly remind my middle-aged seminar participants that the quintessential Americans are changing…Who are Ben Franklin (the father of self-help literature). Ralph Waldo Emerson (self-reliance was his trait).Walt Whitman, motivational leader Tony Robbins, and Bentonville, Arkansas’ Sam Walton…and Bill Gates.
WHAT IF
Maybe the wild new-economy America is the old America. Truer to ourselves. We came here to break free, to make our records in our awkward ways.
Like Grandpa, I am facing extinction, only by this new set of powerful forces. I make most of my living giving live seminars and training programs and as a management consultant. It’s all gravitating to the Web—gravitating. It’s moving at the speed of light. I am scrambling to reinvent myself, to not just "cope" but to exploit the new communication and connection media.
In U. S., ______of the white-collar jobs will disappear or alter in the next 10 to 15 years.