Reporter's tech transgressions offer wake-up call for bosses

By Kevin Maney

TONGA -- Yeah, that's where I am. Tonga. Among the Tongans. I'm going to interview His Majesty King Taufa'ahau Tupou IV for a story on vowels.

Who's to say I'm not? I've got my cellphone, my BlackBerry, my laptop with a Wi-Fi card -- I could work anywhere. I could BE anywhere.

The recent scandal at The New York Times has made it excruciatingly obvious that there's a catch that comes with all the gee-whiz technology creating the new mobile workforce: It can be exploited in bad ways, and managers aren't often prepared to deal with it.

''We now have a new variation on the (famous New Yorker) cartoon caption, 'On the Internet no one knows I'm a dog,' '' says Rosabeth Moss Kanter, Harvard Business School professor and author of management book Evolve!. ''It's, 'On the Internet no one knows I'm not in Baghdad.' ''

At the Times, reporter Jayson Blair fooled his editors into thinking he was in places, including Washington, D.C., West Virginia and Cleveland, when he never left New York. Thanks to the latest communications technologies, such as the cellphone, laptop, e-mail, digital photos, a virtual private network and the Internet, Blair was able to fabricate parts of dozens -- maybe hundreds -- of stories and make it appear that he was on the scene.

''His tools of deceit were a cellphone and a laptop computer -- which allowed him to blur his true whereabouts,'' the Times wrote Sunday in its voluminous mea culpa, which will no doubt be a Fox TV movie by July.

In fact, this may be the first big scandal of the emerging mobile age.

Now, that's not to say this is the first time anyone has used a hot new wireless communications technology to deceive the public. Back in the 1930s, there was a pioneer of this kind of thing. Ronald Reagan would sit in the WHO radio station in Des Moines and get the teletype accounts of Chicago Cubs baseball games hundreds of miles away. Then he'd deliver the play-by-play as if he were there. And listeners believed him.

But Blair used technology to apparently take deception to a whole new level, which ought to put managers at every company on notice. Mobile technology is getting better and cheaper. The fad is to arm employees with an arsenal of gadgets so they can work anywhere, anytime -- or, more appropriately, everywhere, all the time.

In most ways, this is good. It gives people freedom. It helps them be more productive. It improves quality of life by, for instance, allowing them to change a diaper while discussing the latest round of financing with the board. But the technology has come on so fast that companies often don't have policies to govern it, and managers often lack the training or thought processes to handle it.

''As new technology solves one problem, it often creates another,'' says Julie Collins, interim dean at the University of North Carolina's business school. ''We don't anticipate the problems, and then we end up reacting to them.''

If you're an executive grumbling about the good ol' days when people answered phones that rang at their desks, get over it. Blair is 27 -- part of a transitional generation that has embraced mobile technology but grew up when mail and phone calls still went to a place.

The generation now in college grew up with cellphones and e-mail. To them, mail and phone calls go to a person, and the person can be anywhere. The idea of communicating with a place seems as pointless as perking coffee in the drip era. The coming generations will expect to be mobile, and know how to take advantage of it.

Then how can managers let go but at the same time stay smart about their mobile workers?

Part of the solution is in human relations, business schools say. For instance, managers need to regularly meet with mobile workers to establish trust.

Another part will come from technology. ''That's good news for the tech sector,'' Kanter says, ''because every problem -- even problems that produce backlash against technology -- is an opportunity to invent something to solve it. A minor example: caller ID.''

Some of the needed solutions are already popping up. The newest cellphones have built-in cameras that let you snap a picture and transmit it wirelessly to someone's e-mail. If I had one of those and my editor suspected I wasn't really in Tonga, she might say, ''Hey, why don't you snap a shot of you and King Taufa'ahau and send it to me.'' Either I find a life-size cutout of King Taufa'ahau near my suburban subdivision, or I'm toast.

Also, location-based technology is beginning to be built into cellphones and other mobile devices. By triangulating with a global positioning satellite and your distance from a cell tower, it can locate you within about 10 feet. ''That will enable cellphone users to summon a taxi by simply pressing a key on their phone,'' says Jim Senn, professor of high-tech strategy at Georgia State University. A manager might ask an employee to push just such a button to verify his or her whereabouts.

At Qualcomm, executive Kevin Gregory showed me a wireless tracking device that uses that same technology. Available in Japan, the gadget is the size of a fat magic marker. Gregory told me that suspicious Japanese wives are buying them and dropping them into their husbands' briefcases. Managers can't be far behind.

Anyway, that's it. And I have to run to catch a flight to, um, Madagascar. If you need me, call my cell. E-mail me. But don't come visit.