Firms Urged to Plug Into Computer Network Age : Thousand Oaks: Economist says foreign concerns adapting to web of information are leaving many U.S. companies behind.

American business executives got a sobering warning Thursday at a Thousand Oaks conference on the dawning of the computer-driven Information Age: adapt or die.

U.S. companies, the conferees urged, must quickly master worldwide information networks such as the computer-based Internet or risk being left behind by savvier domestic and foreign competitors.

“We’re in the midst of a transformation,” economist Michael Rothschild told the audience of about 75 at the Civic Arts Plaza.

While some insightful foreign companies are learning to adapt to the growing worldwide web of information, many U.S. companies are “still embedded in the Machine Age,” he said.

Rothschild’s remarks opened Passport to Tomorrow, a conference that the World Affairs Council of Ventura County organized to address the dizzying changes in the world economy.

And the conference closed Thursday night with appearances by former Vice President Dan Quayle and Rep. Robert T. Matsui (D-Sacramento).

Throughout the morning, Rothschild and panelists from industry and academia declared that the “Global Information Age” will change the world even more profoundly than the invention of the printing press in the 15th Century.

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Rothschild authored the theory of bionomics, which holds that the world economy is actually an ecology that should be tended like a growing garden, not merely repaired like a non-growing machine.

The use of computers, Internet connections and fax machines has boomed exponentially since about 1989, propelling the world economy into a greater dependence on the latest information for its survival and growth, he said.

As cells process sugar and protein, so must companies feed themselves--information as well as money--to grow, he said.

“I believe learning is the ultimate source of profit and growth,” said Rotschild, president of the Bionomics Institute.

“What companies ought to be up to is gleaning knowledge from the day-to-day experience of other companies,” he said. “There ought to be some kind of analysis of what could be done differently. Very few companies do this. They just move on to the next project.”

Companies are doomed to lose out to competitors if they ignore the advent of the Information Age, said panelist Liev Blad, a managing partner of the Los Angeles Electric Vehicle Alliance and chief executive officer of Hub Engineering.

But first, they must overcome a fear of computers that is blocking their progress, he said.

“We are at the point in the United States now where we are so technology-rich and application-poor,” Blad said. “And we look to forward-moving countries of the world to tell us how to put these technologies to use.”

A split is growing between executives who understand computers and those who do not, warned Professor Jon Goodman, director of the Entrepreneur program at USC. Society should quickly embrace these information tools too, she said.

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“When you go into . . . a classroom and you do not see saturated information technology in that school, you can be sure the children are being shortchanged,” she said.

But one panelist warned that computer-related jobs can isolate people from the society they serve--such as telephone information operators who sit plugged into headsets, typing at keyboards and talking to disembodied voices all day under constant supervision.

Janice Wood, who represents 70,000 unionized telephone workers in California, Hawaii and Nevada as vice president of the Communication Workers of America, asked: “Will we create this type of environment for more and more workers?. . . . That’s a decision we have to make as we consider this new technology.”