PLODDING TOWARDS PARADISE:

The Camels of Innovation: Following in the path of yesterday's software wizards are today's infotech plodders. You'll find them amassed in suite hotels. Thank them for the nation's productivity gains. (David Brooks, 12.23.02, Forbes)

Call them the demure successors to the Bobos (bourgeois bohemians)--information-age elites who brought us Restoration Hardware, vegetarian dog biscuits, ice cream companies with their own foreign policies (Ben & Jerry's) and Silicon Valleyites who worked in black T shirts and hiking boots, as if gearing up for the Norwegian Winter Olympics team.

That highly educated elite still exists, but it no longer defines the times. Life and the economy have become a little crueler. In times like these you return to the fundamentals. Who is keeping us safe? Who makes us financially secure? How to preserve us as the most productive nation on earth, by far?

Who is keeping us strong? Alan Greenspan has long championed the idea that productivity keeps advancing because companies are using information technology at every level of the production process. And the people who make that possible are not only the software geniuses in their Silicon Valley aeries. It's the regular men and women who do the IT training sessions, who take out the bugs and fix the crashes, who adapt the technology factory by factory, cubicle by cubicle. It's also the people who refashion production techniques and packaging designs, and market store-display innovations. These people are the technology camels, hauling the riches of the cutting-edge research centers across the vast expanse of the empire and making them available to the regular Dilberts, shoppers and keyboard jockeys.

The quintessential icons of our age can't be found in an REI outdoor gear store--like the would-be instant millionaire, thinking of opening an enviro-lodge. Look for them in the suite hotels. That's where the technology packhorses roll in tired after a day of training sessions, meetings and seminars. And where the low-key entrepreneurs are unfabulously building the companies that will be famous tomorrow.

Another triumph of substance over style. Posted by Orrin Judd at December 6, 2002 8:46 PM