EDITOR’S PAGE

“We hope you, will work for and with Fortunate 500 [sic] companies, making money, having a good time -and doing business only with peo-ple who are pleasant.”

-From Re-inventing the Corporation, by John Naisbitt and Patricia Aburdene



Has your boss hugged you today? Does your corporate cafeteria offer whole wheat pancakes? What? The only corporate cafeteria you know is a nearby Jack in the Box? Quick, get on the new epithet express! It’s time to reinvent your workplace. Drudgery is dead! Smile! Have a nice day!

I’ve heard the good news according to John Naisbitt: Better times are ahead. At a recent breakfast with Naisbitt, best-selling scribe of Megatrends, and his wife, Patricia Aburdene, I found myself eager to embrace their vision of corporate tomorrow: day-care vouchers, flextime, corporate jogging paths, cafeteria-style benefits, bosses as “coaches,” not tyrants. And Utopia is at hand, say the authors, because of a few years of declining birth rates. Baby bust equals seller’s job market. Play fair, Mr. Corporation, or we’ll play elsewhere.

Re-inventing the Corporation, with its rainbow-covered capacity to reach at least the same six million people who bought Megatrends, is destined to become a megatrend itself. Sure, it’s Pollyannaish in its outlook, two-dimensional in its methodology and possibly flawed in its message, but why be picky? Megabuzz phrases are easy to clutch and carry. Especially those in win-win, be-your-best-friend books.

It occurs to me that we catch a new craze approximately every 2.8 years. We’ve seen America Greened and Future Shocked; business urged to Search for Excellence and What They Don’t Teach You at Harvard Business School. We’ve tried being Sensuous Women, Total Women and women Having It All. Now, according to New York magazine, we’re Women Having Second Thoughts on Having It All. Can a sequel by Helen Gurley Brown be far behind?

America loves labels and slogans and catchy titles. Forthright and declarative, they help us find cubbyholes in a chaotic world. We cling to epithets as to a steering wheel on an out-of-control car. Slogans as humble as “Where’s the Beef?” or as exalted as “John 3:16” have become symbolic bumper stickers for our times.

The era trumpeted by Naisbitt and Abur-dene is The Information Age. We are not an Industrial Society anymore, we just act like one, they say. We are a new “Nation of Clerks.” And we in Dallas are lucky clerks at that: We live in the capital of the Sunbelt, in an International City. Though we may be the Divorce Capital of the World, we are home to America’s Team. We are a Great City That Deserves a Great Art Museum; a City That Works.

Perhaps more than other cities, Dallas reinvents itself every so often with a new phrase. And God knows we’ve needed redefining: after the Kennedy assassination, after liquor-by-the-drink, after news commentators during the GOP laid a conservative Yuppie rap on us that won’t go away. Would the mayor of Boston have gone west grumbling that we are the “lowest of the low” if he had realized that Dallas is more than Home to J. R. Ewing?

If John Naisbitt can reinvent the corporation and reinvent politics (his next arena), why can’t we reinvent our image? Slap on a label and declare the dawning of a new day? How about A De-Central-ized City? or Boomtown, Forever? Home of the Non-Smoker, or Where’s the Bum? Or, for that matter, A Great City Deserves a Great University? After the recent recruiting abuses at SMU and TCU, we may need to reconstruct the stereotypical back-slapping, deep-pocketed alum. New images can be cathartic.

I’ll admit to the role that we who write headlines and editorials play in perpetuating labels and images. Cursory reads are a fact of fast-paced lives. But yes, we do occasionally like to take a slogan and hold it up to the light. So it is with this month’s cover story on Dallas’ performing arts. We have declared ourselves a major arts center with the Arts District as our rallying point. But does anyone really think of the Arts District as a destination yet? Aren’t we, somewhat typically, putting the cart before the horse? Philip Seib, a lead player in the Arts District’s development, looks beyond the hype, chiding the city to back up our grandiose claims with tangible support.

Perhaps equally as important in a city whose art patrons are famous for buying tickets and not appearing for the show is this: Are we aware of the incredible array of performances staged here every night? I wasn’t. Our Hot Tickets (beginning on page 107) help pare the choices to a manageable number. How do our arts companies stack up- with each other and with those in cities of comparable size? Critics of dance, symphony, opera, theater and pop music take a close look.

If Dallas is a capital city of anything, surely it is the Real Estate Capital of the Nation. In my book, any downtown that paints its tallest building with fluorescent green has the underlying confidence to lay legitimate claim to the title. Don’t give me statistics; give me image, pure and clean. Who will add a notch and who will be squeezed by the tightening of the real estate belt? See page 135 for a special report.

And if ever an industry, not to mention a corporation, needed reinventing, it is cable TV. The final bell has rung, mercifully, on our recent three-year bout with Warner Amex (which, we are told, has no jogging path and only junk food for its employees), but will the new cable company be any better? A former Warner Amex insider delivers a gutsy post-mortem and prognosis, beginning on page 67.

Then there are those stories that defy reduction to a single phrase. Those are the ones that give us fits during group headline sessions. Try reducing to bite size the dilemma faced by ex-cons who are released from prison. Most have little more than pocket money and must try to rejoin society with little support from their families. Now some have hope in a new community program called OPEN, INC. See page 124.

Perennial problems like recidivism andAttorney General Jim Mattox’s recently rein-vigorated campaign against dads who fail topay child support (page 128) are proofpositive of why we cling to sloganeeringMessiahs like John Naisbitt. It’s so easy tosing Rah, Rah, Happy Corporation, TakeGood Care of Me and Your Profits Will TakeCare of Themselves. Who can argue with aphilosophy that is both “pro-people andpro-profit?” Maybe I’m too cynical. Ourcorporate cafeteria added a frozen yogurtmachine. Will they reinvent our pensionplan next?