What's on Your Agenda?

Confusing times demand clear thinking and focused execution. The best leaders are those who can concentrate everyone's attention on the most important threats facing their organization -- and on the biggest and best opportunities for creating a fast-growth future. We asked 10 senior executives and thinkers to explain the most crucial item on their leadership agenda.

Ray Lane

Job: General partner
Org: Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers
Place: Menlo Park, California

After I left Oracle, I started to think about the Internet from a broader perspective. Out of that thinking came my vision of the "real-time enterprise." That's a fancy tag line for a company that uses Internet technology to drive out manual business processes, to eliminate guesswork, and to reduce costs. My goal is to help create companies that can enable or fulfill at least a part of that vision.

The key feature of a real-time enterprise is spontaneous transaction flow. In most businesses today, an event like a customer order spawns thousands of transactions that go through a series of vertically organized departments. As a result, most companies have a highly fragmented view of their customers. A real-time enterprise addresses that problem.

The Internet is still the most important business platform of the past century. Nothing rivals the Net when it comes to reinventing business processes. Size begets complexity, and complexity loses. But the Net can enable big companies to behave like the small, homespun companies that they once were.

Ray Lane joined Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers last September, shortly after resigning his position as president and COO of Oracle Corp. Earlier in his career, he held senior positions at Booz Allen & Hamilton and EDS.

Aaron Sorkin

Job: Creator, executive producer, and writer of The West Wing
Place: Burbank, California

When the West Wing first met with popular acclaim, I just panicked. I started worrying that the show could become very unpopular very fast. For whatever reason, I desperately need the approval, week after week, of 17 million complete strangers. Without sinking too far into the therapist's couch, I'll just say that I fear failure -- and for me, the worst kind of failure is writing a bad script.

How do I do that? Logistically, there aren't enough hours in the day. Even when I finish a script, that just means that I'm late in starting the next one. But for me, the trick is to follow the rules of classic storytelling. Drama is basically about one thing: Somebody wants something, and something or someone is standing in the way of him getting it. What he wants -- the money, the girl, the ticket to Philadelphia -- doesn't really matter. But whatever it is, the audience has to want it for him.

In the end, my goal is to create compelling theater. Beyond that, I'd like to celebrate public service. We tend to view politicians either as Machiavellian schemers or as dolts. Neither type interests me. Similarly, I'd like to raise the level of public debate. I don't want to create some kind of after-school special, but I would like to see certain issues receive a full-throated airing.

Aaron Sorkin writes roughly 70 pages of dialogue per week for The West Wing. His writing credits also include the movies A Few Good Men (1992), Malice (1993), The American President (1995), and the TV show Sports Night.

Kathy Biro

Job: Cofounder and vice chairman
Org: Digitas Inc.
Place: Boston, Massachusetts

This year marks the end of the dotcom smugfest. To celebrate, I've set aside my managerial responsibilities so that I can fully explore the future of e-business. The Internet industry is desperate for adults who can speak in reasoned tones.

Only two metrics matter: return on investment from your marketing mix and lifetime value of each of your customers. Forget about clicks, hits, and page views. You can't treat the Web like a mass-marketing vehicle -- not anymore.

What's the right marketing mix? You have to make sure that every point of contact -- in a store, by phone, on the Web -- is completely synergistic. The Web has proven that customers have zero tolerance for fragmented lines of business.

Meanwhile, results matter. You need to convert new customers into real revenue. The biggest risk to the growth of the Internet is something that nobody had considered until very recently: What if most Net spending simply ends up generating business that companies would have gotten anyway?

In the end, my job is to help the industry prove the positive economic impact of the Internet. The Internet represents a fundamental transformation that we can't take for granted. For companies even to consider cutting back on Internet spending is absolutely criminal.

Kathy Biro (kbiro@digitas.com) was director of Digitas until January of this year. Before helping to start Digitas, a $187 million Internet-services firm, she was a senior strategist at its predecessor, the consulting firm Bronner Slosberg Humphrey.