Title:

REAL TIME, Preparing for the Age of the Never Satisfied Customer
Regis McKenna, Chairman, The McKenna Group

Abstract:

Technology is transforming business and the marketplace in profound ways, and the pace of change is speeding up, not slowing down. Almost all technology today is focused on compressing to zero the time it takes to acquire and use information, to learn, to make decisions, to initiate action, to deploy resources, to interact with customers and to innovate. As such, consumer attitudes, perceptions, and expectations for service are being altered. From banking at the grocery store to home cholesterol monitoring, people expect immediate and customized responses to their needs.

The successful business of the future will have to adopt new business models in response to new technology and changing consumer attitudes. Traditional processes must be supplanted with fast, efficient, knowledgeable and responsive systems. Understanding will be necessary to create a real-time sensing organization that is constantly monitoring, feeding, querying, adjusting, initiating, and responding--prepared for the eventuality of anything. The task of management will be to understand the driving forces shaping the new real-time competitive marketplace. In the emerging high velocity business environment, managers must have a foot in each world--technology and the market--and take an active role in shaping the response systems for building real-time customer satisfaction.

Biography:

Regis McKenna is Chairman of The McKenna Group, a management and marketing consulting firm specializing in the application of information and telecommunications technologies to business strategies. The firm's expertise is focused on emerging technologies and markets. McKenna, 58, helped launch some of the most important technological innovations of the last twenty five years, including the first microprocessor (Intel Corporation), the first personal computer (Apple Computer), the first recombinant-DNA, genetically engineered product (Genentech, Inc.), and the first retail computer store (The Byte Shop).

In 1985, McKenna wrote the first book devoted to the marketing of high technology companies - The Regis Touch. Now translated into nine languages, the book elucidates McKenna's marketing theories and strategies. Since then he has authored three more books, including Who's Afraid of Big Blue? in 1989, and Relationship Marketing in 1992. His new book, Real Time, Preparing For The Age of the Never Satisfied Customer was published by Harvard Business School Press in September 1997.

McKenna is on the advisory board to Stanford's Graduate School of Business and is a trustee at Santa Clara University. He is a venture partner of the venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and serves on the boards of various Silicon Valley companies, projects and public foundations. Currently, McKenna lectures and conducts seminars on technology marketing and competitiveness issues throughout the United States, Europe, and Asia.