Are You Preparing for the Future?

Steve Rubel points out an article by Mike Elgan on how media companies have only themselves to blame. I found this statement in Mike's article to be especially relevant to the current business discussion:

Newspapers hawked their future in order to invest in the past. Those acquisitions were all about buying up antiquated companies who viewed their industry as a machine that converted trees into money, rather than as creator of content.

Every company that has been in business for a while is being dragged kicking and screaming into this new digital age. Digital is a new way of thinking about business, not just a delivery mechanism.

This is not a conversation about content, although your content matters. Nor it is about digitalization of business, you may be in an industry that does not lend itself to being digital - I cannot think of digital food, for example, or homes.

It's about the future, your future, which you may have seen coming for several years now without doing much to prepare for it. Newspapers thought they were in the print business, they focused on the medium business when they are in fact in the content business. Content is portable and relevant now more than ever.

Managing Risk is to Relationship Building

When I was in risk management consulting we stated that our product was a relationship - that was the focus of our business, and we did a number of things to honor that. Many of those things involved risk mapping, captive insurance management, reinsurance treaties, and they involved introductions to other companies that were a better fit for what clients were looking for.

The tools at our disposal were many, the model was to respect and grow relationships. That was one of the winning propositions (we've been talking about value propositions lately) that allowed us to peer around corners and win clients over the Goliaths of the day. Our model was portable and scalable and adaptable to newer media and tools.

Like Context is to Telecom Companies

Take telecoms as another example. If they think they are in the phone service and connectivity business, building and maintaining pipes and networks, they have lost to many free or near free tools like Skype, for example. So if they do not wish to be a commodity, these companies need to realize that they are in the context building business.

The iPhone was the true eye-opener in that respect. Not just a smart phone, but a delivery mechanism that created context for content, communications, services and yes, commercial transactions (iTunes) to be performed.

Preparing for the Future

Print media is learning this lesson the hard way - enormous losses, layoffs, and bankruptcy filings.

The financial industry is learning its lesson as well from the laws of probability - according to Nassim Nicholas Taleb, small probability events carry large impacts, and (at the same time) these small probability events are more difficult to compute from past data itself [...] past Black Swans do not predict future Black Swans in socio-economic life.

We may not be able to predict the future. Yet, we need to prepare for it. Preparation starts with a solid grounding in the understanding of what business we're really in.

What does this mean to you?

1. Peel back the medium and figure out the "what" you deliver and where the digital opportunity for that resides. Then figure out how to make the what an experience that nobody else provides.
2. Be ready to challenge your assumptions when it comes to inferring the future from the past. The laws of probability are in favor of taking the leap onto a new model when extrapolating from current observable trends.

Preparing for the future needs to take into consideration how your products and services are being used by your customers and what that means for your business model. What business are you in?

Comments

[Colleen O'Donnell Pierce]

Excellent point! I tried to convince our local Business Journal about a year ago that they should focus more on developing their online delivery methods, as opposed to selling their souls to try and hawk their print copies. But to no avail. Instead they still include a postcard in every print issue trying to convince subscribers that one print issue is not enough for everyone in their office. Maybe now they will rethink that. In a way, they are in the same business I'm in -- the storytelling business. I'm enjoying your posts -- glad I found you!

[monique de haas]

Very good article, It articulates the need for a starting point at the context of users (social contextual design). Focussing on adding value to the needs of users, long before you mark this down in the use of any platform. Thinking in platforms is really narrowing the minds and cutting off prosperous routes too much in advance. I don't need a newspaper, i need news. I don't need a mobile telephone, I need an always on connection to my beloved, working groups and friends. I don't need internet, I need information and connectivitiy..

[Mary Ann Geier]

Hello Valeria,
Mike Elgan calls old media's efforts at digitization as "mere tokenism," and that, to me, is the central truth of his article. Virginia Heffernan goes into more detail about this same idea in a very perceptive piece in the NYTimes Magazine, see (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/07/magazine/07wwln-medium-t.html?partner=permalink&exprod=permalink). She asks, "Does anyone still believe that the forms of movies, television, magazines and newspapers might exist independently of their rapidly changing modes of distribution?" I'd ad books to that list, too, especially reference and textbooks, and the output of nearly the whole of the STM publishing industry.

Monique is correct in her comment above, that old media are doggedly trying to solve the wrong problem by tweaking what is no longer relevant.

Merely migrating content that comes out of the traditional content-development models & processes into newer digital output formats is still old-school thinking, and probably not nearly radical enough to help old media institutions survive. But I think it is a waste of time to target "format-neutral" as a content goal. There is no such thing anyway. Delivery and distribution constraints are always a fundamental assumption when content is being generated. Those assumptions are changing, and our idea of what is possible and desirable in content will change along with it. As publishers struggle to identify the value they can provide and sell, they may find the walls dividing newspapers, books, tv, journals and magazines disappearing.

[Valeria Maltoni]

@Colleen - we are in the storytelling business and not in the tools business. Technology changes. Many industries are facing similar issues and continue to hold on to what made them successful in the past. If that was tied to old distribution, then they need to understand how what they do scales to new distribution. To me innovation resides with the job customers want to do, not so much what they seem to embrace today (I continued the conversation at today's post on Trust). Likewise, thrilled to have had a chance to learn more about how you work.

@Monique - you got it. I like it how you flesh out the business requirements. So often we start with the tools before asking what is the job that needs to be done.

@Mary Ann - delivery and distribution constraints need to be part of the consideration along with business requirements. The way we pull information in one medium (and thus the format desired) is not the same as that of another. You last sentence is key in the comment - the walls have come down, now it is up to each of those businesses to figure out what business they wish to (+ can) be in.