The Growth of Spreadsheet Cultures

The failure of social foresight is usually leveled at dotcom management who failed to heed Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan's warning about "irrational exuberance" and speculative bubbles (Cassidy, 2002: 132, 187). Blame has also been leveled at the major investment banks (Fullerton 2001; Smith, 2002) as a "billion-dollar club" (Frank, 2002: 364) for manipulating the public for short-term financial gains. This analysis is frequently supported by referring to Charles Mackay's writings (Frank, 2002: 109) and behavioral economics studies of herd behavior (Cassidy, 2002: 124) and international cascades (Cassidy, 2002: 232). This analysis overlooked how dotcom language and "spreadsheet cultures" had thwarted effective foresight.

Long-term survival as a dotcom depended on the ability to exploit higher-order abstractions and information ecologies. A crucial scenario-generating tool was the computer spreadsheet, which became metaphors that were "rhetorical devices, used to persuade." (Schrage, 2000: 47). This quantitative analysis underpinned the New Hollywood-style pitch culture, whereby business plans became icons like Healtheon's "Golden Triangle" and "Chart of Many Bubbles." (Lewis, 1999: 366). Computer spreadsheets and dotcom language created "new realities by reframing old ones." (Schrage, 2000: 55). Both tools evolved in a climate of early 1990s management fads that changed North America's business ecosystems (Micklewait and Wooldridge, 1996; Frank, 2002: 191), notably the shift from Reengineering and Total Quality Management to Intellectual Capital and Knowledge Management (Edvinsson and Malone, 1998). This shift occurred while analysts were devising new business models of company and industry foresight (Slywotzky, 1996; Hamel and Prahalad, 1996; Mintzberg, Ahlstrand and Lampel, 1998; Frank, 2002: 241).

The failure of these companies is now frequently blamed on management that abandoned the Shareholder Wealth Creation profitability model for "First Mover Advantage" and gaining audience "eye-balls". Early Internet depictions were influenced by branding metaphors and cable television analogies. Planned broadband and e-commerce roll-outs, which would have strengthened these analogies, suffered from 'last mile' technological problems (Mamatas, 2000). Perhaps this mind-set outlived others because New York's Silicon Alley piggy-backed upon Manhattan's finance/media ecologies (including the three main television networks, major newspapers, book publishers, national magazines, advertising agencies, and 10,000 journalists). (Cunningham, 2001). Tribal DDB executive John Young noted: "New York is just a society of ideas. That's what we get off on." (Kaitt and Weiss, 2001: 189). "The drive is part of it," observed Kyle Shannon. "This is the center of culture, the center of business, the center of world communications and trade." (Kaitt and Weiss, 187). New York's Silicon Alley "was employing 250,000 workers and producing nearly seventeen billion dollars in revenue" by the year 2000 (Kaitt and Weiss, 2001: viii)

The combination of spreadsheet culture and cluster location enabled early dotcom consultancies to diversify into specific markets: Agency.com (Fortune 1000), Razorfish (new launches), and SiteSpecific (marketing companies). (Kaitt and Weiss, 2001: 80). This inter-group competition kept spiralling due to new rounds of venture capital funding (resource scarcity) every three to six months, and was promoted by social hierarchies like Silicon Alley Reporter's annual SAR 100 list of the industry's key players.

Influenced by the early 1990s popularity of postmodern theory (Frank, 2002: 278), early dotcom consultants wanted to revolutionize business with consensus business practices. They conceived of a fundamental shift from autocratic-entrepreneurial management to a humanistic-systems model. This optimism is captured in the opening "pitch" montage of Jehane Noijaim and Chris Hedegus' documentary Startup.com (2001) about GovWorks.com, whose founders Kaleil Isaza Tuzman and Tom Herman, chased a $600 billion "vertical market" in municipal fees (Noujaim and Hedegus, 2001; Cassidy, 2002: 235). The Internet's ability to alter global consciousness was equated with the 1960s Apollo space program (Pottruck and Pearce, 2000: 280). Jacques Derrida's literary deconstruction was translated via Francis Fukuyama as "the dismantling and reformulation of traditional business structures." (Evans and Wurstler, 2000: 40). For Michael Lewis, Healtheon "like a lot of Internet companies, was a shifting abstraction." (Lewis, 1999: 366). Unfortunately this palimpsest gave rise to self-referential hyper-relativism and rampant narcissism (Wilber, 2000: 26-28; Frank, 2002: 293). Dotcom consultancies failed to anticipate how traditional management consultancies and trans-national corporations would reverse-engineer their service offerings after the initial sales cycles. Dotcoms lacked metrics and environmental scanning capabilities to monitor their environments. FEED Magazine's Stephanie Zanarick spoke for many when she said, "Our incompetence saving us is a theme throughout our history." (Kaitt and Weiss, 2001: 76).