SHORT TAKES

“Tomorrow's planning departments will be analogous to hospital emergency rooms,” says Roger Nagel, author of Agile Competitors and Virtual Organizations. Nagel, who is also the deputy director of the laccoca Institute in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, explains his comparison: “A hospital's ER has to know the community and has to be able to respond to anything from a heart attack to a drug overdose—things that cannot be predicted with certainty.”