Do Business Well

Flooded with trillions of trivial pieces of information, millions of 4 human minds are now as saturated as any swamp. Junk mail fills mailboxes; magazines stuffed with ads run as long as five hundred pages and can weigh as much as a newborn baby. Advertisers stamp their logos on every conceivable surface, from cruising blimps and ski-lift towers to e-mail screens and bus roofs. Some television markets offer two hundred cable channels. An Internet surfer discovers a Milky Way of random data, much of it conflicting and some of it stupefying.

According to The Washington Post, a study by the Gallup Organization and the Institute for the Future found that the typical office worker sends or receives 190 messages per day. (Yes, per day.) Even if it takes just a minute on average to process a message, the study indicates that dealing with messages consumes three hours a day. How splendid if this means that improved communication is making business smarter and more efficient, but how depressing if it means that three hours are added to the already hectic workday.

The planet-wide Internet now enables virtually anyone to speak his or her mind to most of the human race, start a Web page, barge into chat rooms, and flood the world with e-mail messages. Whether or not the resulting noise makes sense to recipients is another matter. For many, it all seems a bit like being bombarded with popcorn. Much of the Internet’s swirling information is ignored and quickly vaporized like a passing rainstorm. If the best of it is a testament to the miracle of worldwide free speech, the worst is malicious gossip, the grammar of paranoia. Not yet equipped with the means of verification, the Internet has more than its share of misinformation dressed in fact’s clothing. Sometimes it is hard for anyone standing in the popcorn burst to know which passing kernel to grab, and even the sharpest of us misses key bits.

Information sprawl is also rampant in most corporate settings. As the cost of storing and transmitting data declines, the amount of information collected and circulated becomes a tidal wave. Desks pile high with directives, product data, intelligence on competitors, musings for the coming corporate retreat. When the sales representative takes her notebook home stuffed with product updates to read, how much can she really absorb? The top 2,000 companies in the world are expanding their information storage by 40 to 50 percent per year. That means doubling the amount of stored information in two years. Presumably this is valuable information (after all, companies did decide to spend money storing it). But the question remains: How long will it take managers to put it to proper use? Can they truly be expected to keep up with the flow?

The challenge of information processing these days is less about its technicality and more about how to digest it all. And for a customer trying to choose what to buy, too much information is almost worse than too little. The effect is paralysis or denial—and no sale.

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