by Karl Albrecht and Ronald Gunn

About the authors: Karl Albrecht is chairman of Karl Albrecht International, a business consulting firm in San Diego, and author of more than twenty books on management and organizational effectiveness. Ronald Gunn is managing director of Strategic Futures Consulting Group in Alexandria, Virginia.

Something strange happened on January 1, 2000: All across America and the rest of the developed world, nothing strange happened.

Virtually everybody was keyed up for the dreaded Y2K event (which meant little more to most people than the turnover of computer clocks), but what we got was a nonevent. No economic meltdown, no financial disasters, no planes falling from the sky, no food riots. The anarchists and doomsday cults also came up empty. It was, by any measure, a Big Letdown. Many people...