Recently, I flew Northwest Airlines. The plane left Minneapolis right on schedule. The middle seat was unoccupied. And the meal — a cold Chinese chicken salad catered by Leeann Chin, a Minnesota restaurant chain — was downright tasty. The flight was thoroughly pleasant.

Miracles are where we find them. From my perspective as a former Osborne computer owner, miracles cover the landscape.

Right now, today, a business professional can carry an entire office in a briefcase. A laptop computer, Jazz drive, cellular phone, and portable printer make any hotel room a complete, productive work area. If you don’t think that’s a miracle, you haven’t been in this business very long.

Right now, today, you can assemble a project team, give the group a room to work in, and within a half hour create a functional collaborative working environment. Not a miracle? I remember when every NIC installation presented a unique challenge. (MacFolk — yes, I know Macs could do this a decade ago. I also know they did it with a pointlessly proprietary, extra-low-bandwidth network.)

And of course there’s electronic mail. Ignore its value for commerce. Within the United States alone, homemakers, grandparents, and kids in 10 or 20 million households regularly correspond with one another without ever smearing ink on crushed trees.

These technologies, supposedly too hard to use, have been socialized and are embedded in our culture, ignored until they break.

The technology by itself is awesomely complicated, appearing simple through the expedient of being commonplace. To cure your complacency, consider how many separate items, most of which you don’t understand at all, combine to let e-mail, or LANs, or a simple laptop computer happen.

There’s the CPU — millions of transistors connected in ways few of us grasp. The hard disk — capable of storing at least 15,000 complete novels and retrieving any one of them in a second or so. The LCD — how many of us even know what a liquid crystal is, let alone the engineering detail involved in a modern active matrix LCD?

And then there’s the operating system. Even Windows 95, nasty as it is under the hood, is an amazing accomplishment when you figure we used CP/M just 17 years ago.

Tally up the team that collaborated to make a laptop computer possible. Don’t forget the physicists whose quantum-mechanical theories made possible William Shockley’s invention of the transistor; the production engineers without whom Gordon Moore’s integrated circuit would have been a laboratory curiosity; and the materials scientists who transformed liquid crystals from another laboratory curiosity to a cornerstone of modern business and who have increased the ability of thin magnetic films to store information 10,000-fold over the past 20 years.

Thousands of people collaborated to produce your laptop computer, most unaware of the enterprise in which they were engaged. Thousands more created the Internet, the public telephone system, and all the other accoutrements of modern life, most of which ignore the boundaries of nations (no small miracle either).

Meanwhile, in the next room a 4-foot-high mammal practices “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen” on an electric piano. Her younger sister, having already perfected “Little Drummer Boy” for this afternoon’s recital, tries to keep me from finishing this column — the little shyster is learning to play chess, and eventually will outclass her dad, who manages to maintain a close friendship with his ex-wife (another miracle, for which my ex-wife gets most of the credit).

A mere eyeblink ago each of these bipedal, linguistically all-too-capable mammals lay in a crib. As all infants do, they had mostly reptilian brains and looked remarkably like Yoda. In another eyeblink they’ll be dating and I’ll need a baseball bat.

We live in an age of miracles — they’re all around us. Understanding how they happened makes them more miraculous, not less.

The season is filled with wonders. Make it wonderful.

When I was the PC czar for a previous employer, I’d annually have to explain our spending “all this money” on PCs when we’d just spent “all that money” on PCs the year before. I hauled out all the usual arguments, and some unconventional ones besides … all to no avail.

The CFO had prepared counters to the usual arguments, of course, and became irritated at the unconventional ones. Like most executives, he disliked surprises; like many, he found countervailing facts and logic irritating once he’d made a decision. Finally, he presented his clincher: “If PCs increase productivity so much, why hasn’t our headcount dropped?”

When I expressed doubt as to the validity of headcount reduction as a useful measure of productivity improvement, I was told we lacked a good measure of productivity, so he was using that until we got one.

Recognizing the futility of argument, I changed the subject (until now).

Computer backlash seems to be picking up steam again. You can find good examples of this gleeful technology bashing in the writings of Paul Strassmann, whose new book, The Squandered Computer: Evaluating the Business Alignment of Information Technologies, received a glowing send-up in the September/October issue of Harvard Business Review.

Strassmann’s arguments go something like this: Computers are supposed to make companies more productive. If companies are more productive, their sales, general, and administrative cost (SG&A), indexed by the cost of goods sold (COG) ought to have decreased over time. SG&A per COG dollar hasn’t decreased over time, so the benefits touted by IT advocates are, in the terms of Michael Schrage’s HBR review, “… the big lie of the Information Age.”

Every big lie requires a big liar, and since nobody else seems to be around, I guess I’ll have to assume the mantle of responsibility and do my best to perpetuate this big lie.

Strassmann’s argument contains a fatal flaw: There’s no reason to expect SG&A (accounting lingo for overhead) to decrease when you invest in IT. None. Why would it?

You see, capitalist societies include a complicating business factor called competition. It’s a complicated concept, but I’ll try to simplify it. Competitors, you see, are companies that want the same customers you do, and they’ll work hard to get them (unless the company is Novell or Apple, of course, in which case they’ll work hard to give Microsoft their customers … but that’s a different story).

Competition confounds simpleminded productivity measures. Product quality, for example, doesn’t remain constant over time in a competitive environment — it improves or the product fails. And around these quality improvements companies have wrapped extensive service offerings. Why? To stay in business, because their competitors were busy wrapping extensive service offerings around their higher-quality products.

As documented here earlier this year, service isn’t enough either. (See “What customers buy,” 8/11/1997.) Progressive businesses add entertainment dimensions to their products and services; transform sales and marketing into affinity enhancement programs to move from mass marketing to mass one-on-one marketing; and “molecularize” everything to transform manufacturing from mass production to mass customization.

None of this comes cheap. These programs require significant investments in IT. Companies that don’t invest fall by the wayside; those that do stay in business so they can play the game again next year.

So here’s my challenge to those who claim IT investments are worthless: Find one company — just one company — in a competitive industry that’s succeeding while keeping the books on ledger paper, typing correspondence on IBM Selectric typewriters, and managing inventory on index cards.

It’s the nature of competition that you have to keep running faster just to stay even. The measure of IT value, then, isn’t SG&A over COG. The proper measure of success is simply staying alive.