Distance Learning

Frances Cairncross CBE, rector of Exeter College, former management editor of The Economist, ex-high sheriff of Greater London, award-winning journalist and holder of eight honorary degrees, is nothing if not forthright: "We must emulate America as fast as we can," she says.

In order to remain viable in the face of the new emerging economic titans, Cairncross continues, European societies require a radical overhaul of their education systems – indeed, their whole educational philosophies.

"What we need to be doing – and I'm not just saying this because I'm the head of an Oxford college – is to realise that our universities are going to be key industries, developing talent and producing bright young people.

"Up to now we have tended to starve them of cash, and to tie them up in red tape; at least in the UK, and in lots of European countries, we haven't allowed the universities freedom to charge a premium price for a premium product; to develop variety in the kinds of courses that they're able to offer. It's really important that we do this, otherwise, in that most vital of areas, the education and training of our young people, we are going to fall behind the developing countries. Only America will keep ahead, because it has an extraordinarily varied and unfettered university structure."

We have met in Sitges, Spain, at the Shared Services Week conference where Cairncross is due to present on 'the death of distance'. Since long before she published the first edition of her eponymous book of the same name in 1997, this topic – the societal and economic transformation resulting from the ongoing technological revolution which has characterised our age – has been at the forefront of Cairncross' thinking; and as the revolution has accelerated before her brilliant, aquiline eyes, her concept has grown to encompass management theory, socio-economic geo-policy, resource development – a whole world of change.

The death of distance

"The key idea behind the 'death of distance' concept is that technology is a very important – perhaps the most important – agent for change in today's society because it alters relative price and creates new opportunities. The communications revolution which we've lived through for the last 20 years – which is incidentally still going on, still throwing up new products and new ways of doing things – has been an incredibly important force for change both in the way companies are run and in the way that ordinary people behave."

"Not only has it created things like eBay – which has been important for companies to some extent as well as individuals – and Facebook; it has created all sorts of opportunities for companies to do things differently. And of course it has been the transforming force for the shared services industries. It's made possible things that 20 years ago were really just off the map, like moving large parts of your back-office activities to other parts of the world, or to other parts of your home country."

"One of the important changes that's happening is in the nature of the office. The office is heading off in two separate directions and each has its own consequences for management. One kind of office is becoming rather like a factory: it produces a standard product which is sold to somebody at a distance; the people making it and marketing it probably never meet the customer. Payroll management, for example: that's very like a factory activity."

"The other direction an office has gone in is to become a club, as it were, that people on the move drop in and out of. Many employees who are on the move work now increasingly partly from home, partly from an airline lounge, partly from a hotel bedroom, but come back to the office for all the most touchy-feely, face-to-face parts of the job – because we've discovered that there are some things that absolutely must be done face to face."

"For example if you're trying to sell someone something it's vastly easier to do it face to face than it is over the telephone, or by email. If you really want to clinch the sale you have to look them in the eyes."

Cairncross' role at the head of one of Oxford's oldest colleges is as important to her as any; indeed, the implication is that she sees her role as being very much at the forefront of the economic transformation she describes.

Talent school

"What I run now at Oxford University is, in effect, a talent manufacturing business, turning out some of the best students in the world. What I see is that businesses are going to struggle increasingly to get the very best talent that they can, and employees are going to need to be very highly skilled because the people who are going to make the best use of new technology are those who can empower themselves, who have the ability to take good decisions on their own and know when it's appropriate to take those decisions and when it isn't. That requires a mixture of common sense and high levels of education and skill, and those are going to be very important aspects of the employee of the future."

While Cairncross remains insistent that long-term issues need focus today, she has not of course stayed unaware of our current economic difficulties – nor, unsurprisingly, is she without suggestions as to how they might best be overcome.

"The best way to prepare is to remember that there are bits of the world that are going to go on growing pretty fast – they won't grow as fast as they have been growing but they will go on growing – and they are the emerging countries particularly in Asia. So finding ways to do business over there is one way of keeping going. The other thing is that high-quality products will always have a market – high-qualityproducts sold at a competitive price. So driving quality up, keeping price under control, keeping costs as far as possible under control: those are the ways in which companies are going to get through this."

"I think we're in for quite a long period of moving sideways. I think 2009 is just beginning to appear as being no better than 2008. I think there's quite a long period ahead – at the end of the tunnel is another tunnel. Companies that prepare now by keeping costs down, keeping quality up, keeping tight and flexible are going to be the ones that get through."

This article is published courtesy of the Shared Services & Outsourcing Network (SSON), an FDE media partner.