In the dizzying barrage of insights, images, joke and presented by Watts Wacker and Jim Taylor, what was the overriding idea?

It was that what passes for "reason" will not be enough to guarantee safe passage to the promised land of the future. To cross that prairie successfully requires, above all, imagination.

(This is interesting for many reasons. One is that it is almost the diametric opposite of what Peter Drucker would say after lunch -- that the future has already happened, and our job is to understand it before it becomes obvious. To make a successful crossing requires, above all, conscientiousness.)

But back to imagination. Watts Wacker, a self styled futurist, and Jim Taylor, head of global marketing at Gateway 2000. The "500 year delta" of their title is a play on words. First, a delta is a widening of the river, its most difficult place to cross. Delta is also the letter of the Greek alphabet that stands for change.

What Wacker and Taylor do is is cull the seemingly incoherent facts about the changes humankind is going through, then using their imaginations to step back -- way back, at times -- to see why the crossing seems difficult, and what might be the best way to make it.

Their presentation is made in a deliberately mindblowing fashion, with lots of quotes and graphics, as if they are ransacking the steamer trunk of throwing behind them bits of pop culture, management theory, and historical curiosities -- whatever suits their purpose.

The sinking of the Titanic, that last bastion of faith in human reason, was the dawning of our age of anxiety, of "future shock." Five year plans are a joke when plans don't survive the week. Though times seem generally good, we're all worried about what comes next. We seem disconnected from our origins. The rate of change is accelerating, like a runaway train, and our faces stretch like rubber from the g forces. Nothing works reliably anymore, including time-honored reason.

Even truth is suspect. Nazi leader Heinrich Goebbels hoped to create a world in which truth and fiction were indistinguishable. Wacker cited the storyline of the Star Wars trilogy, in which Darth Vader killed Luke's father, then later turned out to be Darth Vader. Truth is, truth is relative, personal. Technology makes the truth even more elusive. The Internet allows us to be whoever we we want to be. We craft a world of inputs that match our truth -- "Gun nuts don't get any mail telling them being a gun-nut is a bad idea."

We concoct our own reality to reinforce our point of view. Not only can the camera lie -- it lies continuously and so believably. We can hide everything: why bank on planet earth when you can store all your holdings on a computer on a satellite orbiting earth? Bye bye, taxes.

People watching commercials do something interesting. They listen to the claims made for a product, and when one claim runs counter to their experience or credulity, they shut off to all the other claims.

Statistics on future shock, or the era of supreme discontinuity: 80% of all buildings in America have been built since 1950; by 2020, 80% of all buildings in the world will have been built since today.

Or how about this one: it took 5000 years to create humankind's cumulative database up to the year 1966, and it took 30 more years to double that database -- to double all knowledge. It will double again in six years. Twang!

Wacker and Taylor say we are in a condition of "Cultural Schizophrenia," in which we are all heading in opposite directions simultaneously, and denying that there is a conflict. Example: a fundamentalist Moslem in an Armani suit. Another: by acquiring Digital Equipment, Compaq finds itself in the strange position of being a mission-critical supplier to Dell, its most bitter competitor.

Our grandparents might get to know 25 other people in their entire life. Because of the Net and other ways of circulating information, people today can "know" 25,000 people. We longer see ourselves as patriots or countrymen. We are city people, city-zens, and we swear allegiance to the virtues our city -- our "Mythopolis" embodies.

In the category of "stuff," Wacker and Taylor revealed that the poorest household today has more general belongings than the average household in 1971.

The clamor for convenience has backfired in one instance. Despite hopes in the 50s and 60s that modern appliances and processed foods would require less time in the kitchen, people are spending more time there than ever! (With the bathroom and garage as runners-up as rooms in which to socialize.)

Interesting perspectives: the TV remote did more to revolutionize our outlook than the atom bomb, and feminism has done more to alter our century (mothers have become household CEOs) than computers and world wars.

History can be reduced to "wavelengths," periods separating great changes. The waves can be 500 years long, or 500 minutes. Truth has its own cycle times. Metaphysics has its wavelength. technology certainly has its. They use the image of the Slinky toy to illustrate the tension of wavelengths -- slack in the middle, and taut at the beginning and end of the cycle.

Nodding to Alvin Toffler's "three waves" of history, they changed the formula a bit, so that they resembled Slinkies. Instead of an agricultural, an industrial, and an information wave, they see an agricultural, a consumer, and an intellectual property wave.

Then they broke each wave down into a first half, in which a discovery is made, and a second half, in which people learn what to do with the discovery.

Agriculture began with the discovery of tools and climaxed in the formation of civilization.

The consumer age began with the discovery of trade, and climaxed with the explosion of making and selling we know as the Industrial Revolution.

The intellectual property age, now just dawning on us, begins with the idea that everyone can have exactly what they want, when the want it, and the way they want it. Ideas become the new currency: TV Guide makes more money than all three networks combined. How that age climaxes, Wacker and Taylor aren't sure.

But it will be weird, a world, like Willie Wonka's, of pure imagination. Wacker wondered aloud whether it would be possible for Willie Mays to "patent" and collect royalties on the basket catch, or Chris Evert be paid whenever someone uses the two-hand backhand.

Doubt it if you will, but it is the future. Forget mining minerals from the earth, they say, America's truest wealth lies in its capacity for innovation and adaptation.

Half the failure in the world, Watts Wacker quoted a favorite cowboy adage, comes from pulling on the reins of a leaping horse. Think about it.

The Moebius corollaries of that saying: Good judgment only comes from experience. And experience only comes from bad judgment.

The condition of leaders today is that they are not leaders in the old sense of experts. Knowledge workers are the experts today. The task of leaders is to attract, motivate, and wring the best out of this new breed of worker -- a worker who knows his value, and that he can leave one place of employment for another whenever he chooses. How do you lead the unleadable -- people in full control of who and what they are?

The two speakers spent the second half of their presentation laying down rules for this schizophrenic new era. The key ingredients: absolute honesty and discretion, belief in an absolute outcome, and tolerance for disparate styles.

Honesty. Do you inform employees when bad things happen, like when your competitors vault ahead of you or a campaign fails? You should, because the news is in the air anyway.

Discretion. This means being humble. In the knowledge world, managers can't walk around with their noses in the upper atmosphere. Smart bosses learn early the arts of disclosure and self-deprecation. If Dress Down Friday is a good idea, how about Dress Down Every Other Day as well?

Absolute outcome. Something specific and good will come from an effort. Identify where you need to be and work backward from there -- a visioning technique Richard Pascale recommended to us several years ago.

Tolerance. More than tolerance, really. We have to accommodate people's differences to make them feel welcome, to get them to stay on. In the knowledge world, every tribe contributes, and no tribe (the word is elastic enough to include ethnic, religious, and psychographic characteristics, like "geeks") can be treated as second-class.

A product or a service, Wacker and taylor said, isn't what it appears to be on the surface. The product itself is just an artifact. What it stands for, what it really means, is deeper -- it is the truth of a promise you make to your customers.

Take Pepsi and Coke. They are 99.99% the same thing. Yet the Coke brand is valued at $63 billion, and the Pepsi brand at $9 billion. Why? Because Coke makes good on its promise of absolute refreshment to its customers.

At Taylor's own Gateway 2000, the computer products are mostly generic items. But gateway has made a breakthrough with its promise that its computers will show respect to the things its customers hold more dear than their PCs -- their time, their families, their careers. South Dakota based Gateway has positioned itself as the real compute for the rest of us -- folks who could give a dining about ROM and RAM, and just want to get where we're going.

Taylor coined the phrase silicon prairie to signify not just Gateway's midwestern location, but its moral attitude toward technology -- that Gateway would be the average user's wagonmaster as they crossed the inland delta of the future. So, too, is the leader of the knowledge era a wagonmaster of the people in his or her charge.

Built to Last

How did Nokia of Finland last 700 years? Why did half of 1980's fortune 500 drop out of the listing? Companies that habitually succeed show four characteristics,in wacker and Taylor's studies. The first is self-explanatory: access to money.

The second is incredible sensitivity to stakeholders: Fortune 500 companies have an average of 70 stakeholder groups, above and beyond investors and employees.

The third is a tolerance for ambiguity in thinking. A company in the marine hardware business, like Lands' End, can't balk at the idea of stepping boldly into outdoor apparel, when that sideline shows promise.

Trust, says Francis Fukuyama, is the product of moral reciprocity. And moral reciprocity must be the bedrock of the new organization. It is how you make a compact with to lead the unleadable.

When you make a promise and you keep it, your company creates a legend or myth. Myths are to groups what dreams are to individuals. The legend of Coke is that its formula has a lock of customer refreshment -- its myth is that the two people who know the formula can't fly the same jet.

Is wagonmaster a universal metaphor, one that will communicate beyond America's midwest? Seems that Genghis Khan's hordes had wagonmasters 1100 years ago.

To be a wagonmaster you must protect the wagon. Your words must be universal. Your myths must be believable -- they cannot be fairy tales. Your greatest asset, in the end, is your story. Make it a true one and it will live through many waves.

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