【单选题】

What Will WeDo 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 theDestructive Nature of theCurrent Flavor ofCompetition,DotcomCompany.
Sure, most will fail.But the survivors will exert enormous pressure—fast! —on theBig Guys. When anAmazon or aCharles Schwab moves into your neighborhood, you’ve got moments to react. Or take king entrepreneur JimClark 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, MichaelDertouzos, 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 andDaimlerChrysler 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 ofB2B(business to business)electronic commerce, which will soon encompass trillions of dollars in transactions.
FIFTH TimeCompression.
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