We are witnessing the birth of a new generation, described not so much by their age, as by their actions in the world. They are using the freedoms of the new economy to develop a set of behavioral strategies: Digital Aboriginal.

This new generation is driven, yet they rarely plan. They function equally well in the accelerated Net time of the high-tech world and in the empty spaces that tend to provoke synchronicities. Although brilliant strategists, they often chart their courses based on pure instinct. They are highly individualized, yet depend on deeply tribal ways of birthing ideas. In the guise of looking for killer applications and the next technical edge, they are leading a revolution. They are operating from clear and coherent models of success and leadership, which are the heart of this book.

They are forging new business scenarios based on their insatiable creative spirit. They are driving new values in the workplace from their relentless commitment to reshape the future with greater meaning.

These emerging behaviors are changing the shape of business as much or more than all the underlying technology that triggered them. So much focus is placed on the technical side of the equation, it is easy to lose sight of the fact that it is people who are driving the future of business.

In the current economy there is almost no lag time between a dream and its implementation, a purchase and its fulfillment, a change in the market and a corresponding response. At first this kind of acceleration feels like a need to move faster and integrate unfathomable amounts of information. But once you are doing business at the speed of thought, it no longer feels like speed. It describes a new dimension, rather than a response time. It's a new domain of knowledge, not just a faster version of what already exists. Radical acceleration frees you to track information in a far different way.

I will gradually introduce a broad cast of characters from a wide variety of occupational fields who are actively using strategies that often fall outside the familiar habits of highly effective people. In fact, they are going against the well-known dictums we've been told are critical for success. They don't begin with the end in mind; instead, they actively deconstruct any preconceptions of how things should unfold. Rather than set priorities, they will deliberately destabilize their surroundings so new directions can peek through. They've gone way past blurring the lines between home and work; they are blurring the lines between almost everything. They don't just think outside the box; it's their permanent address.

Of course, this has always been the way of adventurers, pioneers and revolutionaries. Great leaders never let the rules stop them; this is how they are wired. But what is most startling about our current conditions is that now we all have to operate this way, merely to survive. When I speak about this new breed of digital aboriginals who are changing the face of business, I am talking about you. I am talking about a set of behaviors that have already begun to bubble up in your own psyche. My hope is that making these emergent faculties more explicit will accelerate your journey into this far more creative, dynamic way of living and working.

I tell this story not as an expert on the technical side of what lies ahead. I write from the perspective of an anthropologist observing one of the most dramatic shifts in the organization of our social universe that has ever occurred. I write from the vantage point of someone striving to understand the creative and emotional challenges being triggered by this new economic world. But precisely because of my outsider perspective, my words should evoke some fresh ideas for doing business and charting your career in this radical new environment. I offer a road map for the evolutionary challenges we are all about to encounter.

IN THE BEGINNING

My own experience with these ideas began almost a decade ago through a very personal and quite unexpected experience at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.

I have always loved indigenous art. Whenever I visit a museum, normally I head straight for this section. It never ceases to amaze me how this ancient work holds up under the test of time. It stays fresh and strikingly contemporary despite the fact that these relics may be tens of thousands of years old. Great artists like Picasso have even copied motifs from ancient masks and passed them off as their own, clearly recognizing how edgy these primal images could be.

Of all the indigenous art I know, I particularly love the Australian aboriginal paintings of songlines. Their seemingly random dots and wavy lines do not represent anything you've ever seen, and yet somehow they seem strangely familiar. These unusual patterns were first drawn in sand, long before they became more permanent images. A particular wavy abstract pattern may represent an emu, a large native Australian bird, walking to a watering hole. Other seemingly unintelligible rhythms of dots and lines may reveal the path the tribe would take to a nearby hill.

The images are not literal, yet they stir some deep primal memory and make sense even though you don't exactly know why. Like a dream you just barely recall -- you know what the images mean, even if you can't quite explain them. They convey a familiarity that is hard to place.

For years I tried to imagine the extraordinary visual experience that would trigger such unique pictographs. I would envision what it might be like to live nomadically, crossing new terrain every day. With no theories in my head and no plans for tomorrow, maybe I too would be able to look out on the world and no longer see such fixed images.

But what did these early inhabitants really see when they looked out on the vast landscape they called their home? Did they truly perceive information differently? Or were their brains just wired differently, so data was processed in patterns now unfamiliar to the Western mind. Why did they translate the very same physical objects that you and I see as solid into what appear as pure radiating fields of energy?

Then one day, I walked into the Museum of Modern Art and turned to the right where the new shows are often hung. There in front of me were six to eight large canvases replicating the patterns of computer boards. The brightly contrasting colors and channels of the circuits wove beautiful and dramatic patterns. They were abstract and yet the designs were purposeful. Although they were presented as works of art, these patterns allowed real events to take place.

In a sudden flash of recognition, I realized I had seen images like these in only one other place--the aboriginal songlines. The channels of these circuit boards were not unlike the wavy abstract lines that these ancient visionaries might have used to indicate a watering hole. The stark colors of both the songlines and the circuits were curiously comparable; both defied the gentle gradations one sees in most art. Both images were at once abstract and yet clearly representational of how energy and matter might interact.

It was in that exact moment that the phrase digital aboriginal first entered my mind. An avalanche of thoughts spilled over me that became the conception of this book. Many years before I ever committed to put words on paper, I began to contemplate this marriage of the ancient and the new. I found the juxtaposition of these two echoing and parallel realities, joined just outside of space and time, endlessly provocative.

How could these ancient people have articulated patterns that would stretch through countless generations and forge their way straight into our present moment?

Why would the most cutting edge of modern technology rest on visual images that were first drawn at the dawn of human history?

This could not be an accident. Obviously these ancient observers sensed a picture of reality so profound and advanced that we have only just recently arrived at their doorstep.

A TIMELESS DAWN AND YOU ARE THERE

The aborigines' strikingly prescient view of the world says that all things are connected. Every relationship influences every other relationship. You cannot separate one event from any other; they can exist only as a continuum.

Further, the within-ness of all things is connected. This allows information from everywhere to freely flow between any two points, building a fabric of connectedness that can be accessed from anywhere.

Every time a layer of appearance is taken away, a deeper order lies beneath. What may at first appear as solid inevitably turns toward the invisible. Matter irresistibly turns to energy. If you look beneath that which seems stable, you will always find the intangible peeking through.

Thus, reality is not a fixed proposition. It is fluid and moving, continually shaped by the beliefs you have about it. We ourselves organize this unbounded field of possibility into the shapes we desire and can reorganize everything once again merely by shifting our beliefs.

Now try reading through the above description once again and it could just as easily be a description of the new economy. The same principles apply.

As I began a deeper investigation into this ancient mirror of our ultra-high-tech world, I realized that these aboriginal paintings also echoed the appearance of mathematically generated fractals, the underlying equations that seem to describe the growth of all living forms. They were also reminiscent of photos I had seen of subatomic elements racing through a particle accelerator. On film, these particles leave only a spray of patterns to suggest their illusive, indeterminate shape. Modern science, as well as many leading thinkers in the social sciences, is beginning to look to far more indeterminate and holographic models of reality to explain how systems are organized. Obviously, these early observers looked beyond the world of appearances to see a more profound order that lies enfolded within our obvious reality. They saw how physical matter conducts energy in the same way a microchip conducts bits of information. Without benefit of advanced electronic microscopes or complex mathematical formulas, these ancient observers saw through the veil of matter.

The new economy is leading all of us to look out and experience the very same view of reality that these early observers saw. You don't have to read a book to get it. Just participating in popular culture or having to adapt to the crazy new rules of business unusual provokes very similar realizations to those of the ancient shamans, cutting-edge scientific theorists and emerging digital mystics. It is not a conceptual realization; it is a lived experience that gets triggered merely by becoming involved in this new terrain. You don't have to learn how to think different: you do it because the sensory experience of the electronic world naturally provokes it.

You innocently download your e-mail, look in on your company's intranet, participate in an on-line chat, research some information and suddenly your nervous system is no longer the same. Merely by touching the electronic world, you have entered into a universe that your ordinary mind may not have even considered, and the traces of this contact cannot be erased.

You probably did not have e-mail until well after 1993. Even cell phones weren't widespread until just about that time. Yet it probably feels like you've always lived this way. This is because you have effortlessly slipped into Net time, where one year now feels like seven.

Our passion for heightened connectivity and faster response has led all of us to a place where our rational ways of defining the world are now insufficient. Without skipping a beat, we have already begun to speak the language of intangible forces. Once familiar business models are collapsing in on themselves, and in their places far more dynamic, nonlinear ways of knowing are naturally emerging. Street heat is making every organization boil, forcing all of us to deconstruct our notions of what is really important. And merely because we have begun to play around in this emerging electronic universe, whether we consciously realize it or not, we are also looking out at the very same timeless, fluid, morphing world that was first seen at the dawn of human history.

This is why I have turned my eyes to the aboriginal world. The very same skills that they used to negotiate their magical, networked, multidimensional world are what we now need to negotiate ours. We may have the theories, but these ancient nomads had the behaviors worked out.

SHEDDING AN OLD SKIN

Although we are all beginning to use far more instinctual paths for doing business, we are still dwellers between two worlds. We are still saddled with antiquated conceptual images of what drives success that we have not entirely let go, mostly because we are not clear what will stand in its place. We have not yet been given a new language to replace the one we now speak.

For example, developing a mission statement is extremely useful in a stable environment, but has far less relevance in an industry where the rug is being pulled out from under you. Business plans are great for focusing your thoughts, but they don't prepare you for the random events that are far more likely to shape what lies ahead. Normal commission structures were once considered motivating. Now many find that they cause people to focus on short-term goals and neglect the deeper client relationships that are so necessary in this new economic climate. Actions that made sense even ten years ago are often shortsighted in today's supercharged atmosphere.

Much of the standard business literature still relies on the idea that we need to define our goals, set priorities, develop our strategies, manage the outcomes and evaluate our impacts. I can assure you that if you operate in this way, someone has already beaten you to the finish line. You cannot plan fast enough. We need behaviors that are far more bold and attuned to the unique nature of our time.

In the pages ahead, you will discover that the new economy requires a body of knowledge that I have likened to the aboriginal way. It is more instinctual, collaborative and intimately resonant with the surrounding environment. As I describe these new laws of success, I am not suggesting something you need to study and learn.

• These are behaviors you are probably already using, but perhaps did not realize.
• These are skills you value, but perhaps have kept hidden in the closet because the standard literature on success had not yet certified these choices as socially acceptable.
• You will discover leadership strategies that build on intrinsic abilities that you have perhaps dismissed as trivial, because they came to you so naturally.
• You will discover paths for creativity that you have probably used frequently, but because they were so effortless, you did not appreciate their true power and significance.

You will discover a series of cognitive and behavioral maps for organizing these emergent capacities into practical paths for solving real-life business challenges. Merely having new language for what you are naturally beginning to do anyway will accelerate your creative process and provoke heightened acts of courage.

As usual, pop culture is well ahead of mainstream business theory when it comes to understanding the new rules of the game.

In the hit movie The Matrix, the two heroes, dressed in black, are suddenly transported onto a stark white screen. Neo, in the role of the student, has just gone through a mind-altering experience that has erased his memories of reality. Because he chose the red pill and the path of courage, his past and everything he believes has just been shattered.

Against the backdrop of this dazzling white ground, Morpheus, the teacher figure, explains that the world Neo has always known, that is so filled with familiar people and things, is really just a blank screen. A matrix.

Nothing is real except the programs you feed in. Everything is an illusion created by the software you use. Images can be shaped any way you desire.

This is a very accurate image of our current cultural and economic landscape. We are in the midst of a powerful shattering of our beliefs about what is important, the nature of loyalty, what the rules are, etc. As the traditional boundaries defining economic activity are fractured and dismantled, there is no longer a fixed order. The more anything goes, the more we are functioning with a blank screen. We can feed in whatever programs we choose. We have never been freer to design our career paths however we desire. We have never had more options for how we construct our organizations. Access to creative expression has never been more available. The landscape is endless, the features undefined, the paths can go anywhere. And that is much of the problem.

To take advantage of a blank screen, you must be more awake, creative and self-aware. It forces you to look more deeply at yourself because there are fewer outside forces determining your choices. Freedom is there for the taking. Unencumbered vision is critical. Bold risks are the path. And that is also the beauty of this new world.