Ever wonder what goes on inside the heads of the world's biggest business leaders?
The March 26 issue of Fortune, featuring perspectives on the '90s from 126 business luminaries, provides a rare glimpse.The twice-monthly magazine produced much more than just another issue to celebrate its own 60th anniversary. It scoured the world for deep thinkers, some big names and some not so well-known, to serve up an outlook for the decade ahead.
The result is a document that is exhilarating and troubling.
Exhilarating because it gives voice - all the views are aired via the first person - to a wonderfully optimistic view of the future, one where the environment is protected, the customer is served and executives hold fewer meetings.
But troubling because it can leave you wondering why all this visionary leadership from the executive suite hasn't yet been translated into hard achievements - especially in America, which by some accounts has lost at least a step in the global business footrace.
Lee Iacocca, ever blunt, gets to the heart of the matter on the second page of the Fortune presentation:
"We can't sit around and commiserate with one another - we've got to get good, we've got to compete, we've got to be world class. We can't just shout it, we've got to be it."
Billionaire Ross Perot follows with a view of who is world class:
"When I go to Asia or Europe, I feel like I'm looking at tomorrow. When I go to many U.S. cities, I see decay and neglect and I feel like I'm looking at yesterday."
That's not to say America is losing its patented ingenuity. Software genius Bill Gates, who at 34 may be the nation's youngest billionaire, says he sees a future of "information at your fingertips" that will give middle managers access to data now reserved for chief executives.
Arno Penzias of AT&T Bell Labs, a leading research and development group, takes the idea a step further, describing a "multimedia" terminal with a "bunch of video windows" that will allow businesspeople to talk with each other while they do their desktop computing.
But Gates adds the sobering view that a lot of "plumbing" needs to be done to put such a system in place.
"We need faster microprocessors, local area networks, graphic commands for the user - all these things we're working on," notes Gates.
What's unsettling is that others may be far ahead of us. Some of the foreign leaders quoted by Fortune leave the impression they could stock the shelves at any moment with the products we've all been waiting for.
Hiroyuki Mizuno, head of R&D for Matsushita Electric Industrial of Japan, talks of "new intelligent tools in the home" - VCRs and home appliances activated by voice commands, even over the phone.
The kicker on his remarks suggests such machines aren't far off, at least for the Japanese.
"All the big electronics companies are discussing how to do this," he says at the end of his commentary.
If the prospect of being overrun by the Japanese doesn't scare you, the comments of some of Wall Street's finest may. Lewis Ranieri, who helped create the mortgage-backed bond business that blossomed in the era of leverage, believes the game of greed will continue in the '90s.
"The hottest game in finance . . . will be guys with cash buying assets at a discount," he says.
The worrisome undercurrent running through these comments is that American leaders may have missed - or ignored - the real lessons of the '80s. As John F. Welch Jr., chief executive of General Electric, correctly notes, "The pace of change in the '90s will make the '80s look like a picnic."
Is the United States as ready as some other competitors to face this future? Maybe not.
"The problem is that nobody is even asking the questions, much less coming up with a coherent set of strategies to execute the answers," computer wizard Steve Jobs told Fortune in what may be the most pessimistic assessment in the magazine.
"Getting rid of General Noriega is important, but I wish the computer industry would get a tenth of the space on our national agenda that he has," says Jobs.