What's on Your Agenda?

Charles E. Phillips

Job: Managing director, enterprise and Internet software
Org: Morgan Stanley Dean Witter
Place: New York, New York

The glamour days of B2B commerce may be over. But B2B is alive and ready for the next stage: a multiyear build-out. The question now is whether customers are building the requisite infrastructure to go from concept to reality. That transition isn't going to be easy or quick -- but I'm still bullish on B2B.

Right now, I'm focusing on early adopters -- companies that have written checks for B2B projects. If those companies really use B2B exchanges, they will generate revenue and create value for their stockholders. To be sure, there's a huge chicken-and-egg problem. People need to take responsibility for leading buyers and sellers into each online marketplace -- and for training those players on how to use it. That's mundane work. But eventually, one big attraction of each marketplace will be that other people are already there.

Companies are not going to shelve their B2B initiatives just because the economy slows down. When the downturn started, Jack Welch said that it spending was the one thing that General Electric wouldn't cut. Not every CEO thinks like Welch, but enough of them do. The B2B sector has a critical mass of early adopters. And even in hard times, I don't think that a single big company is prepared to say, "Paper is fine. Let's just keep doing it the old way."

Charles E. Phillips (charles.phillips@msdw.com) joined Morgan Stanley Dean Witter in 1994 as an equity-research analyst. Previously, he was an analyst for Kidder, Peabody & Co., SoundView Financial Group Inc., and the Bank of New York.

J Mays

Job: Vice president of design
Org: Ford Motor Co.
Place: Detroit, Michigan

Traditionally, car designers have had a slightly elitist view of what's right for customers. That's changing a lot with the new generation of designers. Most of us listen more carefully to customers than our predecessors did. For example, I'm working with people from Ford's brand-development team, taking the verbal information that they gather about customers and turning it into a visual sensibility that speaks to those customers.

While change is important at Ford, what really defines us as a company is what we keep from our history. At least in North America, people have had an emotional connection to Ford that goes back to our Midwestern roots, and we need to draw on that tradition even as we tweak it. Take the new Thunderbird: It's unabashedly fun and American; it's retro, yet its tongue is planted firmly in its cheek.

But if we in the auto industry really want to move forward, we need to break out of the insular mentality that has long dictated car design. That means working with different types of designers. Last year, I worked with an Australian product designer who had never designed a car in his life. Working with him was one of the most valuable projects of my career, simply because it taught me to think differently.

J Mays, who supervised the redesign of the Ford Thunderbird, oversees the design of Ford's "blue oval" line of vehicles, including the F-150 truck and the Taurus.

Harriet Pearson

Job: Chief privacy officer
Org: IBM Corp.
Place: Washington, DC

My mandate is this: to inject privacy thinking into how IBM does business, both online and offline, from how we design new technologies to how we deal with our employees.

The big question is, How do we set policies for addressing all of those issues? The problem with government intervention is that technology changes much faster than legislation or regulation does. The best approach is industry self-regulation, which can evolve more quickly. The Internet is still in its infancy, and we need to allow for flexibility and experimentation so that leadership will emerge from the marketplace.

As one of the biggest, most information-intensive companies in the world, IBM has an obligation to help set the agenda on privacy. I'm working with people from other companies to create new industry-wide standards, along with new technologies that empower consumers to choose how companies use information about them.

Privacy isn't a technology issue; it's a social issue. And I believe that companies really want to help consumers protect information -- not just because it's the right thing to do, but because it's also good business. If a company doesn't earn the respect of its customers by respecting their privacy, those customers won't come back.

Harriet Pearson, who took on the CPO title last November, joined IBM in 1993 as program manager for environmental policy. Previously, she practiced corporate law in Washington, DC and worked as an engineer in Louisiana and Texas.