(FORTUNE Magazine) – The pace of change in the Nineties will make the Eighties look like a picnic -- a walk in the park. Competition will be relentless. The bar of excellence in everything we do will be raised every day. The pace of change will be felt in several areas. Globalization is now no longer an objective but an imperative, as markets open and geographic barriers become increasingly blurred and even irrelevant. Corporate alliances, whether joint ventures or acquisitions, will increasingly be driven by competitive pressures and strategies rather than financial structuring. Technological innovation and the translation of that innovation into marketplace advantage will be accelerating ever faster. And in the coming decade, we're going to see increasing demands for sensitivity to the environment. Only a total commitment of everyone in the company can provide the level of responsibility that will be acceptable to governments, employees, and customers. Simply doing more of what worked in the Eighties -- the restructuring, the delayering, the mechanical, top-down measures that we took -- will be too incremental. More than that, it will be too slow. The winners of the Nineties will be those who can develop a culture that allows them to move faster, communicate more clearly, and involve everyone in a focused effort to serve ever more demanding customers. To move toward that winning culture we've got to create what we call a ''boundaryless'' company. We no longer have the time to climb over barriers between functions like engineering and marketing, or between people -- hourly, salaried, management, and the like. Geographic barriers must evaporate. Our ! people must be as comfortable in Delhi and Seoul as they are in Louisville or Schenectady. The lines between the company and its vendors and customers must be blurred into a smooth, fluid process with no other objective than satisfying the customer and winning in the marketplace. If we are to get the reflexes and speed we need, we've got to simplify and delegate more -- simply trust more. We need to drive self-confidence deep into the organization. A company can't distribute self-confidence, but it can foster it by removing layers and giving people a chance to win. We have to undo a 100-year-old concept and convince our managers that their role is not to control people and stay ''on top'' of things, but rather to guide, energize, and excite. But with all that must come the intellectual tools, which will mean continuous education of every individual at every level of the company. At GE we spend nearly $500 million a year on training and education. We see that not as an expense but as an investment in continuous renewal, the key to productivity growth. Continuous education drives everyone to find a better way, every day. We used to make a circuit breaker -- nothing fancy, the sort you'd find in any commercial building -- that traveled 15,000 miles on its route to market and took 20 weeks to make. It spent ten of those weeks in transit between the eight different plants that worked on it. Could we find a better way? Of course. And we did. We're asking questions like that about everything we do, and we're beginning to find the answers. The Eighties had no shortage of individual business heroes. In the Nineties the heroes, the winners, will be entire companies that have developed cultures that instead of fearing the pace of change relish it.