Real Time, by Regis McKenna. Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 1997.
Notes by Stephen Randall, Ph.D.
Regis McKenna's primary message in this book seems to be that in the world of marketing and customer service faster is better. The ultimate in customer service occurs when "the gap between need or desire and fulfillment collapses to zero." (p. 3) As he says, "Faster is no longer enough. The search for the instantaneous and simultaneous has become the 1990s equivalent of the quest for the Holy Grail." (p. 1)
This idea may be helpful to marketers and planners, and seems straightforward, even obvious these days. While I have no argument with this idea, mixed in with it was a troubling lack of discrimination between our sense of time passing, or psychological time, and clock time. For example, consider the reference to clock time in "the gap between need or desire and fulfillment collapses to zero," and the reference to psychological time in "Real time is what I am calling our sense of ultracompressed time and foreshortened horizons in these years of the millennial countdown." (p. 4) [Italics mine.]
This confusing identification of psychological and clock time is characteristic of our culture [for more on this, see "What We Teach About Time," and "Three Faces of Time and the Spectrum of Time Management"], and it leads to unfortunate results: (1) we feel helpless and we suffer because of clock time's relentless flow, and (2) our productivity and responsiveness are limited by the apparently fixed capacity of time itself. Why does it lead to these results? Because for practical purposes we cannot, and do not want to, change clock time (except in setting clocks ahead/back an hour twice a year); so if we believe that our feelings of time passing (psychological time) are ideally 'accurate' reflections of the 'real' external flow of time, how we can substantially change psychological time?
Another disabling idea is that "The change in our consciousness of time is the creation of ubiquitous programmable technology . . . . " (p. 4) This view that psychological time is the creation of technology is parallel to the view that clock time and psychological time can be identified. [For more on the source of time pressure, see "Finding the Eye of Our Whirlwind of Activities."] Both ideas project responsibility for our experience of time on externals, on objective reality, leaving us somewhat helpless. Some of the future implications are dire: "We will increasingly find that the technologies of speed will not give us the time to see or plan beyond the horizon. We will have to think and act in real time." (p. 8) Rather than suspecting that such shortsightedness results from flawed assumptions, the author accepts it as a "best practice" of future high-achieving organizations.
Clarifying these matters is important, not only because of possible ramifications within American borders, but because "America presents a real time microcosm in which we might first expect to see adopted--technologically as well as socially--the concepts and practices that will soon be diffused throughout the world." (p. 9)
McKenna raises the question: "How can organizations be prepared to reconceptualize what they do in this way? First, by exposing people at all levels of the company to examples of successful adaptations to real time thinking and operation . . . ." (p. 11) But the examples he then provides of such adaptations are largely external, in line with the identification of psychological time and clock time: "ways of developing channels for interactive relationships with customers and building customer communities; using information technology networks . . . ; educating and training customers . . . by building instructions into technologies . . . ." (p. 12) There seems to be no recognition of the possibilities and opportunities of changing our experience of time in the direction of the psychological time warps of peak performance. These opportunities have been recognized by other authors [see reviews of The Tao of Time, Time Shifting, and Results in No Time].
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