Marshall McLuhan, Peter Drucker, Alvin Tofler and Robert Reich

Marshall McLuhan was born in 1911 and died in 1980. By the time of his death, he had been dismissed by respectable academicians, and he was known in the popular press as an eccentric intellectual whose day in the media spotlight had come and gone. By 1980, the transformation of human life catalyzed by television was taken for granted, and it no longer seemed interesting to ask where the electronic media were taking us. But in recent years, the explosion of new media - particularly the Web - has caused new anxieties. Or to put a more McLuhanesque spin on it, the advent of new digital media has brought the conditions of the old technologies into sharper relief, and made us suddenly conscious of our media environment. In the confusion of the digital revolution, McLuhan is relevant again. McLuhan's slogans "The medium is the message" and "The global village" are recited like mantras in every digital atelier in the world. By Gary Wolf Wired magazine, Jan 1996

For twenty-five years, Alvin Toffler has been shocking us with his descriptions of the future. From Future Shock to The Third Wave, Toffler has argued that we are involved in nothing less than a change of civilization - as profound as that from hunter-gatherer to agricultural, from agricultural to industrial. Now back with a new book, War and Anti-War, Toffler is as provocative as ever, as he examines the increasingly bloody consequences of cultures in collision as the Digital Revolution gathers force. The most successful futurists don't predict the future. They make their fortune by interpreting the present in a new way - a way that makes more sense and seems more conventional the farther into the future one goes. Alvin Toffler made his fortune by explaining the strange dread people were beginning to feel about rapid technological change in the late 1960s. By Peter Schwartz Wired magazine, May 1993

"Knowledge exchange" is an intrinsic and critical aspect of business as we have come to understand it in the late 20th century. After all, we speak easily of "knowledge workers," "knowledge resources" and the "knowledge economy." Analysts such as Peter Drucker, Alvin Tofler and Robert Reich have been telling us for years about the central role of human understanding in the global economy which is now fully upon us. Companies need the knowledge of all their workers, not just the privileged insight of top management. They need to establish bi-directional paths to the knowledge of suppliers and strategic allies. Most of all, companies need first-hand knowledge about what customers and prospects want, and be able to turn these perceived needs into successful products and services. By Christopher Locke May 1994 issue of Internet World