The current economic downturn will only serve to accelerate a revolution that has been sweeping the business world for some years, according to business speaker Mr Tom Peters.
"We're in the middle of an honest-to-God revolution, which happens every couple of centuries. This recession may cause us to look one way or another but we don't have the ability to put the brakes on," he said.
"Whether we have a recession of six months duration or 18, 24 or 36 months duration, it doesn't change the fundamental fact that from the world of healthcare to the world of financial services to the world of work itself, everything is being changed."
The Vietnam veteran, former White House adviser and one-time McKinsey partner, who will deliver a seminar in Dublin on November 26th entitled Reinventing Work for Turbulent Times, said the whole nature of work was undergoing profound change.
"We have a different economy than we had in recessions in the past - an economy based on information technology, an economy based on change," he said.
"The biggest issue economically is intellectual capital and the protection thereof because we now live in an economy where the financial wherewithal comes from ideas, not digging around in peat bogs in Ireland or coal mines in Pennsylvania."
But he is full of praise for the economic progress the Republic has made in the past decade. "Ireland climbed on to this idea that talent matters and ideas matter a lot earlier than other people did to a very significant degree," he said.
The internet is the driver behind the revolution, he says. And he has little time for those who claim the internet and e-commerce have failed to live up to expectations and deliver on their initial promise.
"Business will never be the same - ever. Everything changes and the IT revolution is more profound that most people think," he said.
Many companies, employees and governments are unprepared for the major changes in the new business revolution, he added.
"We have all been cossetted essentially by the promise of semi-lifetime employment from big companies," he said. "If you were lucky enough to get a university degree, you went to work at the age of 21 and as long as you didn't shoot your supervisor, you got to stay there for 40 years, and that's over. It was over long before September 11th, but now that process is accelerated even further. It's a world where people have to take responsibility for their own lives and make their own way, and will not be taken care of by big corporations."
Even the future of big corporations looks uncertain in the new world of business, according to Mr Peters.
"The evidence is frighteningly clear - big companies do not adapt," he said, citing research that shows of the 100 biggest US companies listed in 1917, just one, GE, has outperformed the stock market over the subsequent 80 years, while 75 of the companies no longer exist.
The business world is now confronted by smaller, more agile competitors outmanoeuvring their larger rivals.
"Most of them die because that is the nature of Darwinian behaviour in general," he said of these small companies. "But for every hundred that die, you end up with a Microsoft or Sun MicroSystems that literally changes the nature of the game."
Despite the recession, he said it was a time for companies to be aggressive in their investment. "If you can find the money to spend, this is a brilliant time to get the drop on the competition," he said.
As befits a man who describes himself as a prince of disorder and champion of bold failures, Mr Peters said companies should reward excellent failures but punish mediocre successes. He cites Jack Welch, former chairman and chief executive of GE, who once said that nobody got in trouble at that company for having launched a truly bold initiative that for some reason did not work out.
