The Invisible Continent: Four Strategic Imperatives of the New Economy

By Kenichi Ohmae

HarperBusiness          
Publication Date: July 2000
Price: $27.50, Hardcover
Pages: 262 pages
ISBN:0-06-019753-6

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If you didn't know any better, just from observing the frenetic wave of invention and turbulence in our time, you would think that a new continent had been discovered somewhere on the planet -- for exploration in the physical world, throughout human history, has always galvanized exploration in the world of ideas. That, at least, was the conceit of this book -- written by former head of McKinsey Asia and Tokyo mayoral candidate Kenichi Ohmae ,and published at the height of the dot-com boom. This was Ohmae's fifth major book in English, since The Mind of the Strategist back in 1980 (he seems to publish one every five years) and it was a privilege to work on it. The basic conceit, in my opinion, continues to have legs: that a new continent has, in fact, been discovered, but this time it has no land; it is a continent composed of new forms of computer-enabled and finance-enabled behavior.

Working with Ken Ohmae gave me an opportunity to try to find ways to express complex financial and geopolitical interrelationships so that well, so that I could make sense of them myself. That, in turn, led to the book's initial strong following. If any part of it is out of date, it's the section on "Godzilla" companies - claiming that "new-Continent" companies can overshoot old brick-and-mortar companies with dazzling potency. I suspect that Godzillas are already reviving as I write this (mid-2003), and Ohmae may yet turn out prescient. And Godzillas are only one small part of the story; Ohmae packed a remarkable range of experience and insight into his story line, drawing on his experience as a nuclear engineer, politician and entrepreneur (both in Japan), journalist (head of a TV station in Tokyo), and consultant. It took a long time to find a framework that allowed us to fit everything into a conceptual package -- but once we had it, the book was very easy to write, because its story pulled us along.

The four strategic imperatives that Ohmae describes are the need to operate simultaneously as 1) a player in the visible sphere, within national laws and ordinary business; 2) a global player in the borderless sphere, transcending international boundaries; 3) a player in the cyber sphere, with instantaneous contact and new types of business emerging rapidly (and continuing to emerge forevermore; in other words, the Internet won't get "locked in" to a particular set of formats according to Ohmae); 4) a player in the sphere of multiples, where capital expands and contracts at dizzying, accelerating rates.