FASTER, FASTER REAL TIME Preparing for the Age of the Never Satisfied Customer By Regis McKenna Harvard Business School 204pp $19.95 All the CEOs who have been getting hammered for being too focused on the short term can now relax and smile knowingly. They weren't being myopic, nor were they shortchanging the future. They were just ahead of the next trend in management philosophy. That's the quick-read reaction to Real Time by Regis McKenna, one of high-tech's ace trendspotters and a respected marketing wizard in Silicon Valley. Real Time might well have been titled The Fourth Wave and perceived as a sequel to Alvin Toffler's Future Shock and The Third Wave. The author argues cogently that silicon technology has created a mind-set schism. Oldsters who recall Pittsburgh's belching steel mills may find it tough to relinquish outdated notions of standardized production for a mass market. But they must. Young people who have grown up with personal computers (the accent's on ''personal'') have a totally different concept of how the world works. The silicon generation wants products and services tailored to their individual needs, and it expects them now. As a result, companies will have to reorganize to conduct business in real time, because ''the competitive environment will no longer tolerate slow response or delayed decision making.'' Everything will need to be done bottom-up, in quick reaction to market changes. Companies should be geared for ''continuous discontinuous change''--or constant radical upheavals--and an incessant barrage of unforeseeable demands. Planning much beyond the next quarter will be a senseless exercise. Even as McKenna describes our need for instant gratification, the many typographically ugly Web site references in his short book make it difficult to get through it even in almost-real time. There must be a www.something on every page. The publisher should have simply furnished a supplementary CD-ROM containing all those Web addresses. Moreover, anyone who takes the time to ponder the marvels that microchips have wrought will no doubt end up agreeing with McKenna's insights. But the book seems to assume that ''real time'' is something new and foreign imposed by the computer jocks who pioneered this high-tech age. In fact, it's just a new label that addresses old notions of how rigorously time ought to be organized. Decades of ''scientific management'' theories from control freaks such as Frederick Winslow Taylor have deluded managers into believing that the future could be predicted and controlled. It's high time a management guru squelched the notion of scientific management, just as quantum physics and chaos theory have eroded the old mechanistic view of science. Real Time does that. It returns the real-time world to what it has always been--full of surprises. And rising to the challenge posed by those surprises will continue to wring the best from individuals and companies. BY OTIS PORT RELATED ITEMS PHOTO: Cover, ``Real Time''

Updated Sept. 25, 1997 by bwwebmaster
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