Change is today's constant in any industry you can name. Half of the Fortune 500 companies in 1980 fell off the list by 1990, and the trend is accelerating. And although during this period American business as a whole created 20 million new jobs, the Fortune 500 lost over 3 million jobs. Today's global marketplace is demanding radical business change to survive.

Ten years after his landmark book, In Search of Excellence, Tom Peters will draw upon his newest book, Liberation Management, to direct business toward this revolutionary restructuring. Any business firm must increasingly be in the knowledge extraction, integration, and application business. Today's biggest companies are dismembering themselves, voluntarily, in record numbers in order to compete. Management is flattening organizations, linking everyone into every function and then directly to the consumer. In his presentation, Tom Peters will show why centralized bureaurcarcies can no longer excell. The new "knowledge workers" must be "liberated" to operated in fast, non-bureaucratic, information-networking teams. Workers must become self-starters with employers facilitating the new entrepreneurship. Business Strategy will be conducted by moderate-size, highly accaountable, units that are very, very close to the marketplace. And through this "marketizing of the firm," governement bureaucracies must be curtailed in their constraints on entrepreneurship.

From computers to chemicals, railroads to financial services, farming to telecommunications, the old structures are crumbling as the biggest shift since the Industrial Revolution continues apace. And those who adapt will see a new era of prosperity.