Ah, but that decidedly unromantic killjoy called reality has a way of screwing up even the rosiest of dreams. For a variety of reasons-including some big ones that have nothing to do with the company but rather are tied to the overall Nasdaq correction-iVillage's stock price has tumbled from $113 to $8. The vision thing that so recently was called powerful, brilliant, and leading-edge is now called flawed or doomed by those looking through the infallible lens of hindsight. The iBaby subsidiary is being sold. Executive changes are afoot. The second-guess industry is clucking with delight and satisfaction- congratulating itself both for its flexibility in being first among those to swarm iVillage with early praise it hadn't fully earned, and then first among those to kick it for not being perfect and having a stock price much lower than it once was.

I want to stress that I'm all for free-market capitalism and the risk/reward double-edged sword that protects it. I'm not recommending that Al Gore trump his invention of the Internet by inventing a fund that will re-inflate the bottomed-out stock prices of dot-com bombs. But something in this system stinks, and the sooner we identify the rotten part and either heal it or cut it out, the better off we'll be. And it's not just about iVillage-the company is just the latest one to have to bare its soul before the public (which it should certainly have to do, since it is that very same public that invested hundreds of millions of dollars in the company). What concerns me in these situations is best expressed in two separate but related questions. First, does the stock market reward great companies that have strong revenue and profit models and are rigorously focused on customers, or is there some other set of valuations that are somehow more relevant in the context of this goofy notion of the New Economy (as if the Old Economy and its foundations went out of existence)? And second, are today's entrepreneurs focused on building great companies with lots of excited and delighted customers-or are they focused on building high valuations by whatever means are needed, including not being bothered with building a great company or other voodoo metrics that supposedly displaced value and common sense in this, uh, maybe-not-so-New Economy?

Was iVillage's decision to get into E-commerce driven by a desire to serve customers better with what those customers wanted and needed, or was it driven by Wall Street's absolute knowledge that Web companies without E-commerce components don't generate high valuations? As your company expands its Web presence more aggressively, ask yourself: Why are we doing this? What is our objective? What are the measures of success and failure and progress going to be? Will these help us be a better company? Will they help us move faster in the market? Will they make us more able to attract new customers while also making all of our current customers excited and delighted?

In my humble opinion, the broad answer is encapsulated brilliantly in a quote from a recent issue of InformationWeek from Denis O'Leary, executive VP of Chase Manhattan Corp. subsidiary Chase.com (May 15, p. 42): "We're not trying to be a winner on the Internet. We're trying to be one of the best-positioned companies to take advantage of opportunities in the new economy. It's a much bigger battle we're trying to win, and a massive opportunity to change the way business is done."