The Marketleap Report
Vol. 1 - Issue #1 - March 1, 2001

Money begat money. You would have thought that everyone had won the lottery. Business plans without a plan soared through finance meetings with the ease of drugs crossing our borders.

Now that the buzz is gone the business world, woken up from a four-year binge, is wondering what went wrong. Workers scramble to their cubes, executives tuck tail and investors shake their heads and ponder how they lost everything.

But the economy is still producing. Turnover, recycling and chaotic tailspins abound, but we had to know it would. The worry is that the tension of the last four years, the need to break our brains and others banks, has wounded some from seeing the path ahead.

Ideas and careless money fed appetites driven by a human greed that made the eighties look like the green decade. The pre-millennium fever whipped the business world into frenzy. Sales. Marketing. Media. Convergence. Y2K. New buzzwords and plenty of them sped through sockets like 1's and 0's. It brought bliss so strong it had to pop.

It did. And that's a good thing. It's time for some to catch their breath and a few more to speak up. There seems to be a growing perception that the information economy has been beaten back and technology has failed to live up to the hype. That's the lure of the new urge to surge ahead without charting a course.

Those of us in the trenches building the new economy know what it takes. Patience and planning are a start. If more decisions, affecting the combination of workers and networked software, had the benefit of careful planning we could do something special. Technology only moves the way we push it.

Would you buy crack from a clown at a restaurant if he were the waiter? Exactly, but lots of us supported sites that made about as much sense. We took advantage of coupons, deep discounts and all the free stuff they would give us, like monkeys at a trade show. Venture capital flowed into too many businesses that were never planned properly. The hype blinded everyone.

Their business model was laughable. Their revenue streams, questionable. Yet investors flooded their coffers. These businesses appeared in a flash of brilliance, burning capital like a fossil fuel, and then wilted under their own weight.

The end result: friends losing jobs, their retirement - gone as fast as it came. It feels personal. But we've learned more in these few years than we can understand right now. That's okay because we need a deep breath. The first years of flailing around and goofing through things are over. Like dirty children fresh from the playground, it's time to clean up.

Our business can evolve as long as it understands that software won't change everything without careful planning. Web initiatives aren't six-month projects funded with a leftover marketing budget, misguided executives dictating results with dollars.

IT workers, software engineers and designers waste money when the wheels start spinning. All kinds of money. But are they to blame for no decisions, no planning and the insane demand for success?

So much bad business was clamoring towards the web at once that we began to believe that a dip in the river together would do us all good. Baptism by hysteria. Turns out we were wrong. Good to know. In the future, we'll try and line that up a little better.

Why do we build software? Why do we want to connect? Think of those basic questions every day. They are a mantra for where we are. The Internet and software can purify business. That was the real excitement that tickled our noses to begin with. Streamlining process and information into a tool that pulls more from us all.

In the economic world these concepts stand to create stronger relationships, smarter workers and more profitable businesses. But only if we design them to. The organization at every level should understand the commitment.

The impact that we expect technology to make is possible. We don't have to knock our heads together because the information age will not be built overnight. Get back in line. And this time, no cutting.