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The news is, those groups are doing pretty well. The Freenet movement has opened up the Internet to people who can't afford computers. City libraries nationwide report long lines of lower-income people queuing up to surf the net. Handicapped people make terrifically creative use of computers. They are proving invaluable at helping people learn, teach, communicate, and do end-runs around their disabilities. Seniors are the group currently pouring fastest onto the World Wide Web; surfing draws a bigger crowd than fishing.
Nope, the people who still aren't getting it are the people who most need to get it -- the top tier of executives at large corporations. Techno guru Nicholas Negroponte calls our managerial class the "digitally homeless" because they, less than the people working for them, less than their customers, and far less than their own kids pounding away at their game command controls at home, feel comfortable in console mode.
There is a brow-furrowing reality at work here. These people -- the CEOs, VPs, and directorates of large companies -- are the people who must set a direction for these organizations to stake out future turf and future product lines. Because the economy depends on the continued health of our large corporations, to a disturbing degree these people are the inventors and the implementers of our future.
But while the rest of us spent the 1980s scratching our heads learning to create spreadsheet macros, they (for the most part) were engaged in higher-level activities: wheeling, dealing, the board game of global finance and strategy. So executive types never acquired computer chops, and now it seems they never will.
A few years ago, Mary E. Boone of Stanford published a book called Leadership and the Computer (Prima Publishing, 1993, $14.95). It is a collection of examples of ways in which corporate heads put desktop tech to work putting their organizations ahead of the competition. The very fact that the book combined executives with PCs was so odd that the book remains in print, on airport bookshop shelves and biz school reading lists three years after it was published -- an eternity in tech time. Newt Gingrich raves about it on the cover: "Required reading!"
To give Newt credit, he is one of a handful of political leaders who don't confuse a mouse with a remote. But the book lacks the very thing it claims to have -- smoking gun evidence that executives today are on top of the technology shaping the environment they do business in.
If you want some images of the backwardness of the executive mentality, recall Louis Gerstner's remark, when he jumped from the top job at RJR Nabisco to IBM: "I don't even know hot to turn the things on." And this was IBM.
Or George Bush's brittle boasts several years ago that he was taking computer lessons and could boot up a presidential 386 system all by himself. The collective reaction of the computer-using free world: whoopy dingy.
There are exceptions, of course. Lots of CEOs in the technology sector are passionate users of technology themselves. And as the younger generation comes into its own, presumably more corporate leaders will be techno dinks.
There are executives out there who say they are into the e-mail thing. What they often mean is that every day they have their secretaries download the day's mail, prioritize the messages and print them out in summary form, then take the boss's inked-in marginal comments, and type them in as replies. And these are our princes of productivity.
I understand why top managers avoid PCs. First, it is not seen as a high-level skill. Information services has never been seen as a pathway to the penthouse office -- not even in the technology industry itself. Second, the role of senior management isn't something you do with a machine. In traditional common mode, leadership meant giving orders -- no computer needed. In the new age mode, leadership means facilitating. No one is quite sure what that involves, but it sounds more like something you do with a chamois cloth than a keyboard.
One consequence of this abdication from technology is diminished respect from those of us still in the techno trenches. As Dogbert says, "Leadership is nature's way of removing morons from the productive flow."
No one is saying that sitting in front of a computer makes you a visionary. But today's networked computer provides a better window onto the changing world than a month of mission-and-vision retreats in Maui, or a wheelbarrow-load of Conference Board audiocassettes.
So how about setting aside a small chunk of time to play with some non-financial technology tool? An hour a week of Web surfing. Fifteen minutes a day swapping messages with customers, dignitaries, golf pals. Five solid minutes every day to realize that technology is changing markets, relationships, even the way we think.
An awful lot of people are counting on them to get in touch. Soon.
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