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This month a new book will hit the shelves. It's Competing in the Third Wave: The Ten Key Management Issues of the Information Age by Jeremy Hope and Tony Hope (Harvard Business School Press; $27.95). The "third wave," the Hope brothers explain, is, as Alvin Toffler argued in his book of that title, the successor to the Industrial Age, which was the second wave. The second wave is about manufacturing. The third wave is mainly about services, particularly those involved in the high tech field. To be sure, software companies may go like gangbusters (or quickly into the tank), so many people (as in investors) see that there is an appeal in their capital equipment unintensiveness, so they become all the rage, and the second wave, full of machinery and tools and such seems downright dowdy. But I defy anyone to use any software package without the aid of a manufactured computer.

While all of us on this page would agree that manufacturing matters, what really matters to many of us is where it is going to be performed. According to the authors:

"In the intensely competitive environment of the third wave, global organizations will seek out the lowest costs and the highest productivity—wherever these can be achieved. By investing in developing countries, for example, firms can now have new technology, high quality, high productivity, and low wages. The average cost for a worker in the Volkswagen Skoda plant in the Czech Republic, for example, is approximately one-tenth of that for a worker in the company's German plants, but productivity in the Czech plant is 60 percent that of its German-based counterparts and increasing rapidly."

Do the math and figure where the bigger investment payoff will be in the years to come.

It is almost too horrible a pun to use, but the Hopes do offer some hope for those of us who are in the second-wave and who don't want to have to learn to speak Czechoslovakian or some other second language. They've read lots of the current management literature and have come up with what amounts to a 10-point program that can help second wavers stay afloat, both organizationally and, importantly, personally. So, in my version of their points . . .

1. Strategy. Think about it all the time. Know what you can do. And try to anticipate what the market will want. It is important that thinking is bolstered by doing. Experiment.
2. Customer value. As Treacy and Wiersema in The Discipline of Market Leaders indicate, figure out whether you are going to have product leadership (great technology), operational excellence (be lean) or operate on the basis of customer intimacy (be the preferred supplier). Not that these things are mutually exclusive. But trying to be all things to all people is an exercise in futility.
3. Knowledge management. Forget the fuzziness of the "knowledge-based organization." Realize that people know things. And the more people who know things that are beneficial to the organization, the better off the organization is. From a personal standpoint: "Employees must increasingly look to their own education and ensure that their own development and knowledge is up-to-date and can create value for the organization." Do it yourself.
4. Business organization. "At the heart of the new business model lie processes and teams." The functional stovepipes must be eliminated.
5. Market focus. Not all customers are good customers. Figure out which ones are beneficial to retain-then work like mad to keep them.
6. Management accounting. Activity-based costing. Target costing. Kaizen costing. Bottom line here is that the measures of old don't necessarily help operations in the present-to say nothing of the future.
7. Measurement and control. ". . . measures should always be derived from strategy, and as the firm's strategy changes, so should its measures." Harkens back to points 1 and 6.
8. Shareholder value. "Although there are many differences between life in the second and third wave company, one thing remains constant: cash flow is the ultimate source of strength and survival." And the Hopes believe intellectual capital-as in the knowledge in point 3-is the source of future cash flow. It's what counts.
9. Productivity. ". . . the biggest improvements in productivity do not come from machines, technology, or incentives, but from how well managers use technology to improve the organization and quality of the workforce, and whether such improvements meet strategic objectives." It's all a matter of knowing what and knowing how.
10. Transformation. Learn to change. And do it.

The career you save may be your own.