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| Tomorrow's
business world |
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The examples abound, the potential is
enormous:
 More than ten million people have improved their health and fitness at home by
exercising to actress Jane Fonda's Workout videotapes. Millions have followed up
the early home experience by joining regular health and fitness clubs.1
Traditionally British taxi-drivers have spent a four-year
"apprenticeship" learning to navigate the winding backstreets of their capital
city before getting a full licence to drive one of the famous London black cabs. Now a new
driver can install a TravelPilot electronic navigation system, enter the desired
destination, and instantly be guided there by instructions on a small screen. More than a
million Japanese cars are fitted with similar navigational aids. And half the 70,000 new
Mercedes S-class cars sold in Germany each year come with the same type of system.2
Forty years ago it took a six-year apprenticeship to learn typeset-ting on a
now-defunct Linotype machine. Today journalists joining Trends International, a
Pacific-rim publishing company, can become efficient typesetters and compositors in a
day.3
Their company has taken the extensive Adobe Pagemaker
computer software guidebook and compressed it into nine pages of simple instructions.
Trends now produces 27 different high-class home-improvement "annuals" each
year. Any newly-employed journalists can now select from a range of preset pages,
displayed on their computer screen, and proceed immediately to produce similar pages for Kitchen
Trends or New Home Trends.
Trainee teachers, and students in individual classrooms
around the world, will have instant access to similar learning templates on the Internet,
downloading everything from Mind Maps to study modules.
Journalists, of course, include typewriting skills in
their basic training. But others can easily pick up typing by using the Mavis Beacon or
similar quick-learn courses that come with almost any new personal computer.
To learn something much more complicated, like film or videotape production,
try a laser disc with one of the greatest movies and a built-in visual essay on how the
film was made.
Laser discs offer a much sharper image than standard
videotape. They also offer random-access capabilities: you can preselect any movie scene
and instantly jump to it, like music tracks on a compact disc.
Contents Page Preface
Introduction
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