CONNECTIONS. True 21st century corporations will also learn to manage an elaborate network of external relationships. That far-reaching ecosystem of suppliers, partners, and contractors will allow them to focus on what they do best and farm everything else out. And it will let them quickly take advantage of fleeting opportunities without having to tie up vast amounts of capital. Outsourcing and partnering, of course, are hardly new. But in the coming century, such alliances will become more crucial.

Cisco Systems has taken the concept to an extreme. It owns only two of the 34 plants that produce its products. Roughly 90% of the orders come into the company without ever being touched by human hands, and 52% of them are fulfilled without a Cisco employee being involved. ''To my customers, it looks like one big virtual plant where my suppliers and inventory systems are directly tied into an ecosystem,'' says Chambers. ''That will be the norm in the future. Everything will be completely connected, both within a company and between companies. The people who get that will have a huge competitive advantage.''

For some companies, the ecosystem represents not merely the outsourcing of a function or two to save a few bucks. It goes, instead, to the very heart of a company's ability to exist and compete. If not for its dozens of alliances and partnerships, Juno Online Services Inc. (JWEB) in New York, the Internet service provider, could not survive--at least not without hundreds of millions of dollars in additional capital and thousands of extra employees. ''If we had to do it all ourselves, it would be prohibitively expensive,'' says CEO Charles Ardai, who spends 25% of his time on alliances. ''For our customers, it's an invisible experience because of the technology. The coordination among the partners allows for real-time communication and makes it feel more like a single company.''

Juno, though still unprofitable, is an example of an opportunistic insurgent in a new industry. It was formed in 1994 when investment banker David E. Shaw asked two of his managers to come up with ideas about how to exploit the Net. Jeff Bezos dreamed up the idea of an online bookseller and left D.E. Shaw & Co. to found Amazon.com Inc. (AMZN) Ardai, backed by Shaw, created Juno, the first provider of free Internet access, and challenged America Online Inc. Today, Juno is the third-largest ISP.

From the start, Ardai's focus was speed to market. ''You start out with the premise that you don't have much time, so you build the core competency and partner for the rest,'' he says. Juno designed an easy-to-use e-mail service and user interface and then contracted out for just about everything else. It leased phone lines from a dozen companies. It hired out customer service, immediately gaining hundreds of call-center representatives. It partnered with an upstart advertising agency for ad sales. It aligned with dozens of content partners for news, weather, sports, movie reviews, health information, and travel advice. It even outsourced some programming and customer support in Hyderabad, India. ''The partnerships allowed us to get started without huge capital expenditures,'' explains Ardai.