Real Time: Preparing for the Age of the Never Satistied Customer
Author: Regis McKenna
List Price: $24.95
Our Price: Click to see the latest and low price
ISBN: 0875847943
Publisher: Harvard Business School Press (15 January, 1997)
Sales Rank: 7,295
Average Customer Rating: 2.65 out of 5
Customer Reviews
Rating: 5 out of 5
Not Pedestrian at All--Packed with Insights
Below is my review as planned before reading all the negative reviews....everyone brings their own baggage to any book. Following this short review, which was originally written for national intelligence professionals, I have added an addendum with a specific experience in France that illustrates why this book is valuable to anyone willing to take the time to reflect on its fundamentals.
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This may be one of the top three books I've read in the last couple of years. It is simply packed with insights that are applicable to both the classified intelligence community as well as the larger national information community. The following is a tiny taste from this very deep pool: "Instead of fruitlessly trying to predict the future course of a competitive or market trend, customer behavior or demand, managers should be trying to find and deploy all the tools that will enable them, in some sense, to be ever-present, ever-vigilant, and ever-ready in the brave new marketplace in gestation, where information and knowledge are ceaselessly exchanged."
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ADDENDUM: In coming to post the above review I noted a number of negative reviews along the lines of "so 1970's", "no new ideas", etc. Naturally any book is going to strike people with different levels of intelligence and experience differently. Our advice to intelligence professionals and managers at any level is to dismiss those other opinions, spend $20 and 1-2 hours with this book, and judge for yourself. Among many reasons why we found this book meaningful, given our focus on global coverage, weak signals, and being effective in 29+ languages, is the following experience:
In 1994, attending the French national conference on information, we heard one of the leaders of the French steel industry discussing a multi-million dollar business intelligence endeavor (in France this includes business espionage and government espionage in support of business) against steel industries around the world. The punch line, however, was stunning. At the end of it all, he said, they failed because they focused only on the steel industry. In the end, the plastics industry ate their lunch because it was able to develop very good plastic substitutes for automobile parts, including automobile under-carriage parts, and this hurt the French steel industry badly. It was from this occasion that we crafted Rule 003 (Book 2, Chapter 15) on the importance of Global Coverage, whose sub-title could be "cast a wide net." McKenna has the basics right.
Rating: 2 out of 5
Really not so good.
Real Time is really not so good. No new ideas or inspiring thoughts. Reading it is a waste of time basically. I gave it two because you always learn something from "getting into" the writers mind.
Rating: 1 out of 5
It's SO 1997...
This book was extremely disappointing on so many levels. Two factors seem to stand out: First there is a great deal of hyperbole based on the sentiment of dot-coms in 1996-1997: The Internet will be magical and pervasive, customer intimacy is key, "some company" is doing blah blah blah. Many of the smaller companies are out of business. Several of the larger companies cited are making strides in the right directdion, but still don't really appreciate the magnitude of the tools available. For example, [Company], makes wonderful cameras, has implemented a basic "catalog" web site. It tells me nothing about the products that I couldn't find in a dozen other places. If I lost the reference manual to my [camera model], I can't find it here. I'm not sure why I'd even spend time browsing their site.
Similarly, Dell, who makes the excellent laptop I'm typing this review on, had a very good mechanism for letting me explore the options available on my machine. And they even have manuals for total dis- and re-assembly of the machine. However, now that I've had the machine for six months, I want to add a hardware component. Not only is it insanely difficult for me to search for peripherals, but I could never get the answer to a simple technical question that definitely would have led to further purchasing.
A glaring omission in Real Time is a true appreciation for customer privacy. However, to be fair, this book did precede the Permission Marketing book by Seth Godin.
Second, while there's a lot of neat things being done, there are scandalously few suggestions on how to approach them. Anyone could certainly print 1-800 numbers on the bottom of their advertisements, but how do we truly implement a customer delight-ifaction program? You won't find the answer in Real Time. Customer relationship management is hard. ...BR>A bonus annoyance is the formatting of the book with semi-circular changes in the text in order to include a quote. Gack.
This is not one of McKenna's better works, and on it's own, is pretty bad. I'd recommend you pass. Similar Products
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