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Chief Information Officers aren’t immune to the recession, but they seem to be looking at the current situation as an opportunity rather than a crisis. That’s the view among more than a dozen CIOs who spoke at The Economist’s 7^th Annual CIO Agenda, which Modern Media Partners helped to program.

While the conference was off the record, we can summarize the consensus that came out without identifying the speakers. CIOs see the current recession as a chance to revitalize their organizations. It’s a great time to get needed talent, since lots of good people are available, and the right time to work with the business side and vendors to align strategy, take some risks and facilitate changes in the organization that will position it for fast growth in the recovery.

CIOs are prioritizing their investments and, because of the downturn, they aren’t putting money into anything with an ROI of longer than two years. But they see the recession as a chance to help lead their businesses — pushing their IT and business colleagues to develop innovative products. As one said, this is the time to be the grit in the oyster to stimulate the team to be innovative and produce the pearl.

In a luncheon keynote speech that was on-the-record, Jeff Jarvis talked about his new book “What Would Google Do?” He encouraged the CIOs to take advantage of new open technologies and relinquish traditional centralized control. “If you give people control, they will use it. If you don’t, you will lose them,” he said.

In another keynote, Mickey McManus, President and CEO of MAYA Design, talked about how CIOs must tame complexity as we move toward a trillion-node network of intelligent devices.

He noted that half of all malfunctioning products returned to stores actually work fine, they’re just too complex for consumers to figure out. They take an item back for a refund if they can’t figure out how to operate it in 20 minutes. That costs $13.8 billion in lost sales per year in the United States.  Focus on ease of use early in product development because human-centered design pays, McManus said.

The opening session featured two economists offering insights into when the recession may end and the upturn arrive.

“This is the first time we’ve had a recession with the Internet,” said Ward Hanson, a Stanford economist. “That means bad news spreads super fast. The shockwave travels fast, but the turnaround can also happen that much faster.”

He advised marketers to track Google’s advertising prices to see when the turnaround has arrived. Michael Lehmann from the University of San Francisco told the audience that the one statistic to watch is private non-financial borrowing. When that finally starts to trend up, the turnaround has begun, he said.

Asked about how they are coping in an economic downturn, Pam Kaufman, CMO at Nickelodeon/MTVN Kids and Family Group, said she is keeping up spending on research. Christine Petersen, CMO at TripAdvisor, is pouring money into launching new sites overseas. Sylvia Reynolds, CMO at Wells Fargo, said her goal is to hold marketing spending flat, but change the way money is allocated and distributed.

Clearly the recession is affecting behavior. When you type “marketing” and “recession” into Google, you get more than 22 million results, according to John Gerzema, Chief Insights Officer at Young & Rubicam Group.

The second day featured a fascinating panel on lessons corporate marketers could learn from the success of building the Obama brand. “Do you allow controversy to occur on your own Web site?” asked Jim Margolis, Senior Partner at GMMB and a key advisor for Obama who managed the campaign’s advertising. “Take some risks to be part of the conversation. It benefits you more than it hurts you.”

Social media is a key part of the marketing effort at Virgin America, according to Poter Gale, Vice President of Marketing. The company is a heavy user of Facebook and Twitter. On a recent flight, celebrity MC Hammer sent a tweet about how nice Virgin America was and a company employee saw that, tweet’d back and not only did it catch the attention of thousands, it made MC Hammer decide to feature Virgin America in a future episode of his reality TV show – all for the cost of an intern paid to constantly monitor and respond to Twitter.

They announced the link a couple times and by the end of the event it had accumulated more than 300 tweets. It made the event a lot more interactive, kept the audience involved and it certainly seems better to have the audience focusing on the speakers and content rather than the emails flowing into their Blackberry or iPhone.

The polling firm of Penn, Schoen & Berland completed an exclusive survey of more than 1,000 Americans about their views regarding the environment for The Wall Street Journal just before the event. There were some surprising results, such as how little Americans said they would spend to go green, how few knew about things such as carbon trading that could become huge issues in Congress, and their misunderstandings about the true cost of various kinds of alternative energy.

The moderators, three editors from the Journal, worked with us to  show those slides at appropriate moments during conversations on stage with industry experts and leaders, primarily CEOs. The ARS system then let us compare the views of the audience with that of the public.

By the way, these were the only slides used in the entire conference. That’s because the slogan for ECO:nomics is “No PowerPoint. No Pontificating. No Hot Air.”

While numbers and statistics generally can be deadly boring when flashed on screen during a conference presentation, they provided insight and occasional amusement at this event.

Re-inventing the business model

With drug industry revenue growing at its slowest pace in more than 40 years, clearly something needs to be done to get the industry back on track. Multiple new business models were discussed, including expanding the definition of value, i.e., moving from products to customer solutions. There’s also a need to focus much more on drug differentiation, major advances rather than me-too drugs.

Refilling the product pipeline

This is the major short-term challenge, as many major revenue-producing drugs go off patent in the next couple of years and few blockbusters are coming out of the labs. Participants say they are creating more strategic relationships, shifting to a model of being a FIPNet from a FIPCo (a fully integrated pharmaceutical network instead of a fully integrated pharmaceutical company). That way they can benefit from the best thinking and research in the entire industry, instead of only at their own organization.

Going Global

Pharma and biotech companies have been offshoring and outsourcing for years, but the efforts will continue and expand. It’s not only for cost savings, but also for speed since it allows work to go on 24X7. Participants discussed which types of functions work well offshore and which don’t and should be kept onshore.

The top events for CEOs include (in rank order): The World Economic Forum, Chief Executives’ Club of Boston, Fortune Innovation/Fortune iMeme, Fortune Global and The Wall Street Journal’s “D” conference. The top events for other C-level executives include (in rank order): Fortune Innovation/Fortune iMeme, Wharton Leadership, Milken Institute, Fortune Global and (tied for fifth) Committee to Encourage Corporate Philanthropy Board of Boards, Clinton Global Initiative and Economist Global Agenda.

Modern Media recruited most of the corporate CEOs who spoke at the Economist Global Agenda last fall. The CEO speakers included Neville Isdell, Chairman and CEO, The Coca-Cola Company; George David, Chairman and CEO, United Technologies Corporation; Brad Anderson, Vice-chairman and CEO, Best Buy; Jeffrey Peek, Chairman and CEO, CIT Group, Inc; and Tony Zook, President and CEO, AstraZeneca. Let us know if we can help build an all-star line-up for your event, too!

Internet luminaries on stage will answer questions on industry trivia, history, and personalities. Help us think of some stumpers! If we use one of your questions, we‘ll thank you on stage!

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http://www.web2summit.com/cs/web2007/create/media