Zhou Enlai, former premier of China, was asked during the mid 1970s about the significance of the Chinese revolution of 1949. That observation, says Jacques Nasser, CEO of Ford Motor Co., who was in China last month celebrating the 50th anniversary of the revolution, could well apply to the worldwide technological revolution that the Internet has unleashed in this decade. Nasser should know. Speaking at the Wharton School on October 7, Nasser discussed issues ranging from the Internet revolution to the challenges of leading Ford's 360,000 employees. Every second of the day, someone is tunneling into your customer base.
Technology makes that possible.
Anyone who does not look at business as a total equation will be taken over. That perspective, in part, drove Nasser to invest in early September in Microsoft's MSN CarPoint web service. The goal was not, as some might imagine, to sell cars directly to customers over the Internet and to bypass dealers. The most valuable aspect of its partnership with CarPoint is the access that Ford now has to large amounts of customer data about car design, color, feature preferences and so on. Mining this data will enable Ford to better understand its customers, which Nasser sees as Ford's core mission.