Too Old Economy.(backlash against Internet usage)(Brief Article)

The internet visionaries have fallen. What now? Vivendi Universal's Jean-Marie Messier, Ron Sommer of Deutsche Telekom and Thomas Middelhoff at Bertelsmann have all been ousted and speedily replaced by a pharmaceutical executive, a former household-products CEO and a printer. Hailing from what used to be called the Old Economy, this new breed of boss comes from industry circles that were never overly seduced by such New Economy temptations as wireless technology or the Internet.

There's a significant danger that this trend represents a big-business overreaction to the Internet bubble. In the United States it is fashionable to dismiss the Web. At his introductory press conference, the new head of media and communications at AOL Time Warner, Don Logan, was asked what he knew about the Internet, and answered by describing all he knew about the magazine business. In Europe, the bubble was never as big, but the backlash against Internet hype is just as real, particularly among media and tech companies. "They had to be seen doing it, and now they have to be seen not doing it," says Theresa Torris, Internet specialist at Forrester Research. "That's just as absurd." If they listen to their own anti-hype, they risk missing out on the realistic benefits of the digital revolution.

The best scenario for this new breed of Old Economy CEOs would be for them to come in, clean up the mess and leave. At the moment they provide Europe a much-needed dose of anti-hype. The Internet mania gave rise to many interrelated excesses, as rising stock prices unleashed the greatest merger wave in history, and the rush to buy up Internet assets buried many multinationals under mountains of debt. "Those people being fired were in La-la Land," says Manfred Kets de Vries, management scholar at INSEAD, and he calls for some soul-searching by business schools (his included) for churning out too many financial engineers enamored with designing big deals. Job one for Jean-Rene Fourtou at Vivendi is to get the cash crisis under control, for example. Helmut Sihler at Deutsche Telekom is the only one of these new CEOs who was brought in as an "interim" leader, and he's charged with reducing a ...