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• FAST COMPANY  3.2006
Avram Miller
CEO, The Avram Miller Co.
San Francisco, California
Miller, 61, was vice president of business development at Intel and a cofounder of Intel Capital. He played a critical role in launching broadband. He now consults on strategy and business development for consumer-focused Internet companies. First appeared in Fast Company: June/July 1997
"The cornerstone for this millennium is the end of time and space. Most organizations today are run the same way as early-20th-century businesses. Everyone goes to his car, drives to work, has certain hours, has a certain job. It's all built on the factory model. Moving forward, it really isn't going to be important where you are in order to do your job. Ideas are being worked on 24 hours a day. Nobody seems surprised anymore if I wake up in the middle of the night and start IM-ing someone in Europe, because the fact is, they don't even know where I am. And it doesn't matter.
Fewer and fewer people will want to be employees of corporations, because corporations don't have anything to offer. Corporations don't provide security and provide fewer and fewer benefits. People may find new ways to sell their skills. I can imagine eBay or the equivalent of eBay being in the business of letting people bid on work all day long. Office buildings may turn into housing, or maybe individuals will rent office space as you would rent a hotel room.
And those individuals will compete with people from all over the world. This isn't globalization, because globalization to me feels big. I think it's the opposite, it's villagization--making everything smaller and in some sense more intimate. And that's very powerful. I'm totally capitalistic, but I don't like large organizations because they tend to want to control. If this reduces the power of corporations and governments to limit what human beings can do, the thing most exciting to me is the potential for everyone to participate."

--Interview by Danielle Sacks