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“May you live in interesting times,” is an old Chinese blessing (or, perhaps, curse). Clearly, American business, and especially its business strategists, have certainly been blessed or cursed with very interesting times. So interesting that when we were planning our annual Strategists to Watch coverage (which begins on page 16), we enjoyed such an embarrassment of riches it was hard to choose whom to profile.

Emblazoned on the envelope are the words “YOU HAVE ALREADY WON $10,000,000!” Of course, the small print reads, “If you have the winning numbers.” I get these envelopes at least quarterly, and I almost always respond. These contests are, in effect, 32‐cent lottery tickets, and I'm happy to invest 32 cents even if the odds of winning are ridiculously low. While my response is rarely what the marketer hopes for—an order for a magazine subscription—I do become actively involved by searching out the instructions in the contest rules telling me what to do “if you're not ordering at this time” and mailing back my response. And, I blush to confess, twice in the last dozen years I actually ordered a magazine.

In the opening scene of Raiders of the Lost Ark, Indiana Jones faces an unexplored Inca temple. While he has a map of the temple's location, he has no plan of its interior. There is none—no one before him had escaped that temple alive. Indy has to dodge flying spears, falling guillotines, and rolling boulders in his quest for the prize. The remains of his unlucky predecessors give him a clue of their fate, and he uses all his skills as an experienced archaeologist to identify likely traps. He manages to escape with the treasure because he is bold, fearless, and knowledgeable. He is also very, very agile.

It seems part of the human condition to yearn to know the future. If you have at least an inkling of what's coming, you might be able to prepare for it. That's why soothsayers have been with us since the dawn of time, opining on the probable outcome of a specific action or the prospects for an individual. Reading entrails may no longer be politically correct, but astrology, palmistry, and tarot cards have been with us for centuries and show no signs of fading away. And if you're predicting specific events, any of these time‐tested methods—even reading entrails—should serve. Which is to say, if you believe in them, they might help you plan ahead; if you don't, you can easily dismiss them as a lot of malarkey.

Sports metaphors abound in business. You develop a game plan, kick off the new program, and hope for a home run or touchdown. If the plan is not universally hailed, you might denigrate critics as Monday morning quarterbacks, or, if they're especially powerful, you could either do an end run around them or touch base with some of the more influential pacesetters to persuade them to join your team. If no one sidelines you, you have to implement the game plan, which is likely to require quite a bit of teambuilding and coaching. However, if you don't have deep bench strength and you're in danger of striking out or fumbling, you might need to call in a pinch hitter or someone who can take the ball and run with it. The very last thing you want is for some competitor to come out of left field and go toe to toe with you before you can field your best players. But if it happens, you have to be ready to play hardball.

Read enough management books, listen to enough gurus, and you'd think there's no way any company is going to survive too far into the next millennium. The world's just moving so fast, they all say, that executives must ever be poised to leap through windows of opportunity that pop open at unpredictable moments. And they've got to pick the right windows and leap at precisely the right time. It sometimes seems as if enduring the next decade will demand that executives be embued with measurable levels of extrasensory perception.

Cheaper by the Dozen, a book I read when I was a kid, came to mind the other day. It is a memoir about growing up in the early part of this century as one of 12 children of an “efficiency expert.” The story focused on Frank Gilbreth's attempts to apply the principles of time management to raising a dozen children. So the kids bathed and dressed with Father holding a stopwatch over them, and all 12 had their tonsils out at once, because that was more efficient. Needless to say, time management techniques did not translate flawlessly from factory floor to home use.

The “Last Word” for this issue is “chaos.” That's also the first word on countless management gurus' lips these days. Chaos theory, borrowed from the best thinkers in physics, is being touted as the new paradigm for twenty‐first century business.

Let me tell you about yourself. You're most likely a member of the baby boom generation, and, despite the belt‐tightening 1990s, you're doing pretty well. You're probably a senior manager (owner, president, CEO, CFO, or VP) with a household income exceeding $90,000. You're very well educated. You almost certainly have a college degree, and odds are very good that you also have a graduate degree. And you're on the road a lot, with at least a dozen domestic trips and one international trip scheduled each year.

The subject of this issue's cover story, NCR, is 113 years old, which might be regarded as venerable for a U.S. company. Of course, some firms are older—Eleuthére Irénée du Pont de Nemours set up shop to produce black powder in 1802, and William Procter and James Gamble established their partnership in 1837. But only shortly before John H. Patterson founded the National Cash Register Company in 1884, did General Electric (1876), and Exxon (as Standard Oil of New Jersey in 1882) come into being. And just two years later, in May 1886, Dr. John S. Pemberton sold the first sip of Coca‐Cola in Atlanta.