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Sun Microsystems CEO, Marketplace radio host featured at 2000 IU Business Conference Feb. 23
Jan. 12, 2000
BLOOMINGTON, Ind. -- The man whose Silicon Valley company put the "dot" in ".com," the host of the nation's fastest growing business radio program, and a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist with a keen knowledge of economic integration will share their insights at the 54th annual conference of the Indiana University Kelley School of Business on Feb. 23 in Indianapolis.
Speaking at this year's conference will be Scott McNealy, chairman, president and chief executive officer of Sun Microsystems; David Brancaccio, senior editor and host of public radio's Marketplace program; and Thomas Friedman, New York Times foreign affairs columnist and author of The Lexus and the Olive Tree. Each will touch on the conference's theme, "Fast Times-Fast-World-Fast Companies."
"The business climate we find ourselves in today requires a new way of thinking and doing business," noted Dan Dalton, dean of the Kelley School of Business at IU. "Time, distance and information are now competitive advantages -- they no longer represent barriers. This conference will show how fast companies thrive in fast times in a fast world."
Registration and networking will begin at 9:30 a.m., followed by a presentation by Friedman, lunch with Brancaccio and a keynote address by McNealy. All conference activities will be at the Indiana Convention Center in Indianapolis. This year's conference will conclude at 3 p.m.
In addition to IU's Kelley School of Business, other major sponsors of the conference are Eli Lilly and Co., GTE Wireless, Sun Microsystems, Arvin Industries, Deloitte & Touche LLP, Dow Chemical Co., KPMG Peat Marwick, LaSalle National Bank, Kimball International, Spectrum Press, USA Group, Whirlpool Corp., and Arthur A. Angotti Jr.
Opening the conference at 10:30 a.m. will be Friedman, who has been called one of America's leading interpreters of world affairs. His first book, From Beirut to Jerusalem, won the National Book Award in 1988 and serves as the basic text on the Middle East in many universities, colleges and high schools. Last year, his second book, The Lexus and the Olive Tree, was released to high acclaim from critics and readers alike.
The Lexus and the Olive Tree offers a brilliant investigation of globalization, the most significant socioeconomic trend in the world today, and how it is affecting everything we do economically, politically and culturally, both abroad and at home. Drawing upon his years of experience as a reporter and columnist, Friedman understands how worldwide market forces are driving today's economies and how they are playing out both internationally and locally.
"Like El Nino, globalization is blamed for anything and everything, but few understand just what it really is," Kirkus Reviews wrote of Friedman. "In simplest terms, Friedman defines globalization as the world integration of finance markets, nation states, and technologies within a free-market capitalism on a scale never before experienced." Salon's Scott Whitney said of Friedman's newest work, "This is an important book; not since Nicholas Negroponte's Being Digital has a volume come along that so well explains the technical and financial ether we are all swimming through."
Friedman, who also has two Pulitzer Prizes for his reporting as New York Times bureau chief in Beirut and in Jerusalem, will discuss the new ways economies, business firms and governments interact and compete in a world free of the barriers of time, distance and speed.
Speaking after a noon luncheon will be Brancaccio, a bright young face in business journalism. He hosts Marketplace, the half-hour business and finance magazine program which has quadrupled its audience in the last five years and won broadcast journalism's highest prize, the 1998 DuPont/Columbia Award for Excellence.
In a witty and effervescent way, Brancaccio makes business news understandable and interesting for everyone, and the quality of his broadcast also has attracted a significant following among business people. Marketplace today is heard by more than 3 million listeners on more than 270 radio stations in the United States, the America One satellite network in Europe, and Armed Forces Radio worldwide. Brancaccio will have a new book out in February, Squandering Aimlessly: My Adventures in the American Marketplace.
Before hosting Marketplace, Brancaccio was the program's first London bureau chief and reported for National Public Radio, Monitor Radio and Voice of America, as well as for KQED-Radio in San Francisco and WASH-Radio in Washington, D.C. He gained attention for his incisive coverage of major developments such as Western Europe's move toward economic and political union and Eastern Europe's transition to free-market democracy. He will explain how understanding the fast times in which we live influences a company's bottom line.
Keynoting the conference will be McNealy, chairman, president and CEO of the company he helped to found in 1982, Sun Microsystems. In its first two decades, his company has dramatically surfed the right-sizing wave in corporate computing to become the leading global supplier of networked computing systems. The company's market value grew $37 million in 1999, and it had $12.4 billion in annual revenues.
For more than a decade, McNealy has advanced a vision of computers that talk to each other no matter who built them and a vision in which technology works for the user. While other computer companies protected proprietary, stand-alone architectures, Sun focused on taking companies into the network age. As a result, it has become a leading provider of industrial-strength hardware, software and services that power the Internet and allow companies worldwide to "dot com" their businesses.
Since taking the reins as the company's CEO, McNealy has steered the company to constant growth and profitability and maintained its reputation as a strong competitor and innovator. In 1995, Sun was named one of the world's 100 best-managed companies by Industry Week, and Business Week named McNealy one of the nation's top 25 managers. The Technology Business Research Group recently rated Sun the No. 1 technology company.
More recently, Sun's successes often have been associated with the company's phenomenal success with its Java programming language, which has become an industry standard in various markets such as home gateway, interactive television and wireless communication. The Java platform has become the de facto standard in various industry and standards groups because of the flexibility, open cross-platform compatibility, and portability that Java technology provides.
As a master of a "fast company," McNealy will share real-world insights, drawing upon his experiences in leading Sun in one of the toughest business environments.
Also at the business conference lunch, the Kelley School of Business will honor successful business executives who are among its alumni: Jeff M. Fettig, president and chief operating officer of Whirlpool Corp.; Hideo Ito, chairman and CEO of Toshiba America Electronic Components Inc.; John C. Shoemaker, vice president of Sun Microsystems Inc.; and David E. Simon, CEO of Simon Property Group Inc. Jeffrey H. Thomasson, managing director and CEO of Oxford Group Ltd., will be honored as this year's distinguished entrepreneur.
The individual registration fee for the conference is $110 and is encouraged before Feb. 8. Table registrations are $1,000 for 10 persons, or $525 for five persons. Table registrations include reserved seating at lunch and registration to the conference.
Send registrations to Annual Business Conference, Kelley School of Business, 1309 E. 10th St., Indiana University, Bloomington, IN 47405-1701. Credit card registrations can be sent by fax to Conference Registrar, Kelley School of Business, 812-855-3535. Make checks payable to the IU Kelley School of Business Alumni Association. For more information, call the conference hotline at 812-855-6340 or send an e-mail to busalum@indiana.edu
For more information or to register online, go to the conference's Web site at http://www.bus.indiana.edu/alumni/2000Conference.html
(George Vlahakis, 812-855-0846, gvlahaki@indiana.edu)