Fast Talk: The Old Economy Meets the New Economy

Mike Brennan: New-economy companies showed us the importance of having better coffee in our offices! That, and the importance of having a fresh perspective. We could identify some different nuances in how we viewed our businesses.

Eric C. Dean: They not only had better coffee, they also invented the virtual coffee klatch. The Internet-based economy took collaboration to whole new levels. And that not only leveraged the technology, it also allowed people to risk working with others, even if they didn't know them very well. The change in who could talk to whom and in how decisions could be made was remarkable and very powerful.

Lars Nyberg: NCR is a 117-year-old company. We learned that new-economy people did business in other ways. They forced us to think out of the box, and that was a good thing. It's healthy for an old company to think that way. It's one of the biggest challenges in keeping an old company vibrant.

Betsy Cohen: At Ralston Purina, we thought that we were in the pet-food business -- fairly simple. The new economy showed us that we needed to rethink the business we were in: the business, the partnerships, and what our customers want.

Warren Holtsberg: I find the impatience of the new economy refreshing. The concept that fast is better than perfect bodes well, particularly for the technology industry. At Motorola, we used to be able to introduce a cellular telephone, and it would have a life expectancy in the marketplace of about two years. Now we face cycle times of four to six months. People continue to demand new things. They demand change. They're impatient. Bringing that into a big corporation is invigorating.

Jim Sappington: The dotcoms helped us to understand that technology can make a huge difference when it is executed effectively. The changes of the past couple of years have had a huge impact on our management's thinking about how technology can be used to make the business better -- and how it can be used incorrectly.

Fred Crawford: The lesson that I learned was that the big brand-push mentality can be overcome by a viral marketing pull. New-economy companies had a kind of wonderment in the ways they connected with people. They tried to fit their products into the context of their customers' lives, to become part of the fabric of their day-to-day existence. That's a legacy that any successful business is going to have to carry forward.

Amy Williams: At the risk of sounding warm and fuzzy, I think that the thing they got right was bringing together diverse groups of people who had a common vision, passion, and commitment to take on the world. As an old company, that's one thing we want to capture and replicate. There's no substitute for people who have a common vision and passion.

Essay Question 1: Looking for BOBW

Alan Webber: We've explored the misconceptions that have dogged the older companies and credited the kernels of truth that were embedded in the startups. Going forward, we're looking for the synthesis: Is there a version of doing business that combines the best of both worlds -- BOBW?

Fred Crawford: For the past few years, I've been focused on what makes consumers tick. In the new economy, we're seeing people with high disposable incomes, relatively high consumer confidence, but a plummeting consumer-satisfaction index. People are spending more, but they're enjoying it a lot less. And that tells me that we're not providing customers with what they're looking for. When you talk with consumers, it's clear that something has shifted -- and businesses haven't moved with them. My conclusion is that we need to take the front end of the new-economy companies -- their innovation, their way of becoming solution providers instead of product pushers -- and marry that with the back end of the old-economy companies -- their consistency, their execution, their reliability. It's the old-economy delivery with the new-economy customer connection.

Mary Lee Schneider: It all comes down to putting customers first and really understanding what they need. We're a 137-year-old company. And we've gone through an accelerated learning process. We're learning to partner. For example, we work with a company called ScreamingMedia to take customers' content, which was once print only, and make it available for online syndication. We use the same tools, the same people with new skills, and we help our customers find leverage in a multichannel world.