THE CHINESE, WHO HAVE SEEN THEIR SHARE OF HISTORICAL cycles, say there is a visible momentum governing human affairs. Their epic novel Three Kingdoms begins by declaring that empires rise and then fall into chaotic fragments; but from those many small kingdoms, powers coalesce to form new empires to restore order to the cosmos. A grandiloquent way of saying, Sometimes you're up, sometimes you're down, sometimes you're big, sometimes you're small. For those who believe in such chronic convulsions, the business world last week provided the spectacle of two cycles reaching opposite apogees at once, of simultaneous expansion and fragmentation. But...
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