Introduction

Let's put our money where our mouths are...

Our Atomic framework leads us to think some pretty radical thoughts about business structure. Here are some of them <our lawyers remind us to say that these are illustrative and do not represent criticism of the institutions involved>...

The next twelve weeks

• Through a chance encounter on the World Wide Web you connect with someone you have not heard of or spoken to in twenty years. Despite the passage of time a new level of intimacy emerges between you both, and exciting business possibilities evolve.
• Your son declines a graduate job offer with IBM in preference to a year of world travel. The staff at IBM are not surprised – despite the depressed employment market, even the best corporations find it difficult to recruit the best graduates.
• Your father realizes that falls in the stock market means that retirement in his fifties is no longer an option. Instead, he invests all his surplus funds in bricks and mortar, bypassing traditional savings channels.
• An old friend’s business unit is demerged from its parent company. He feels energized by the smaller management team and closer contact with customers and suppliers, and clocks up an eight-hour week for the first time in his life.
• A leading pharmaceutical giant announces that it intends to withdraw entirely from R&D activities, currently exceeding $2 billion of investment a year. Its CEO stresses the need to focus on global marketing and sales in its drive to retain its number one position in the sector. It announces alliances with over eighty biotech and drug discovery companies to fill the R&D gap.
• General Electric (GE) opens up its own stock market to trade over one hundred separately quoted companies within its own corporate portfolio. Investors, both institutions and individuals, are encouraged to swap their GE shares for a portfolio of GE securities ranging from power and lighting to finance and professional services.
• AOL-Time Warner, one of the largest mergers in history, throws in the towel and announces its intention to break apart into five separate companies. This ends what many regard as the largest destruction of shareholder value in modern times.

The next twelve months

• You are told that, due to the continuing harsh economic climate, your services to a Global 2000 firm are no longer required. You receive a handsome pay-off and the promise of part-time work that never transpires. After a few weeks of personal doubt and uncertainty, you fall into a new and more enjoyable pattern of portfolio employment by deciding what your real competencies are and applying them to the marketplace.
• Ford sells off its premium brand car companies, including Aston Martin, Jaguar, Range Rover and Volvo to the French fashion and perfumes company LVMH. In an unprecedented bid to return to its core business it continues to provide manufacturing and logistics services to LVMH, encouraging the new owner to concentrate on brand extensions and product innovation.
• HP completes the world’s largest outsourcing deal with a Taiwan industrial consortium. It transfers all manufacturing and supply chain tasks to its Eastern Partner in return for a 25% share of the new global manufacturing platform and a sign-on bonus of $5 billion cash to cover the asset value. Its workforce is reduced from 140,000 to less than 40,000 worldwide.
• Affected by the downturn in merger and acquisition (M&A) activity, Goldman Sachs decides to spin off all activities in this area and forms a joint venture with leading accountants Deloitte & Touche. The new entity takes equity positions in each of its M&A activities and draws on capital funds from a variety of investment banks.
• Nedcor, a relatively unknown South African bank, bids for and wins the outsourcing of Lloyds TSB’s core transaction processing platform, effectively gutting its retail operations. The deal takes the form of a new global vehicle based in South Africa’s low-wage economy that is soon touting for similar business from the leading retail banks in Europe and the USA
• After almost fifteen years of relocation planning and deliberation, HSBC decides to abandon its new thirty-storey building in Canary Wharf in favour of smaller offices co-located with its business interests. As well as creating better connections to customers, this avoids the vulnerability of thousands of workers concentrated in one building.
• Shell makes an unprecedented announcement – it intends to spin off its global retail operations and to concentrate on oil exploration and production. McDonald’s registers interest in acquiring more than 30,000 filling stations – expanding its own footprint by a factor of two.
• Private equity house KKR is launched on to the NY stock exchange and becomes the second most valued stock after Microsoft. Its principals each become wealthier than Bill Gates and Larry Ellison put together

And the next twelve years?

• The average employment contract for staff working in California will come down from its current duration of eighteen months to less than thirty days – or one working month. The concept of permanent employment will be consigned to the annals of history.
• Upwardly mobile professionals appoint personal agents to manage their career. In return, agents take a share of annual wages and stock options as their fee. Other service companies step in to take charge of domestic obligations such as house cleaning, financial administration and holiday planning.
• The first trillionaire is crowned. He has amassed his fortune in just under ten years as a result of applying intelligent agent technology to web-based search engines – his corporation finds what you need on the Internet. A PhD from Stanford University in 2003, he had now immediate expectations of making money from his research thesis. He is rapidly overtaken by the main investor of a biotech company that is the first to gain approval for a drug that arrests ageing. Neither of these corporations employs more than fifty people.
• Will Smith, film star and singer, becomes the first black president of the United States, where public appeal and charisma are recognized as the essential differentiating qualities of a successful politician. In the UK the Conservative Party, bereft of personalities, slips into quiet obscurity.
• Educationalists abandon fact-based learning in favour of discovery and experience. Virtual reality becomes as commonplace as personal computers in classrooms all over the USA and Europe.
• The most eminent consultancy firm in the world (you know who we mean) closes after the partners refuse to provide any more working capital to keep the firm alive. The only saleable asset will be the research institute that generates more than sufficient equity funds to finance all existing partner pensions.
• A global account team working for IBM undertakes a leveraged buyout, raising over $1 billion to purchase its profitable current customer relationship. The team consists of no more than twenty staff and exploits its new asset by forming multiple relationships with IT, HR and finance service providers.
• Device-to-device traffic exceeds for the first time all other traffic across the World Wide Web. Much of our personal communication is delegated to software agents embedded in our hand-held terminals, laptops, clothes and other intelligent devices.
• Governments impose crippling taxes on organizations of five hundred or more people to discourage inefficiencies in their economic systems. They will also consider introducing laws to limit the size of government departments to fewer than two hundred staff as a means of convincing the electorate that they are serious about delivering value-for-money services.
• Of all the professions and degree courses, Digital Arts becomes the most popular and highly remunerated of all careers in the Western world. Universities such as Cambridge and Harvard vie with each other to offer such training, but Thames Valley – once rated the worst UK University – excels above all these worthy institutions, having been first in the field.