The lingering decline of traditional media

In a most interesting recent report, the OECD did a rundown of the state of the publishing industry today.  What they found, not surprisingly, was that newspapers in many countries are in a sad state of decline.  The report highlights shows a number of interesting charts and graphs.  What do they recommend?  Unfortunately, no silver bullet.  To quote from the report: 

• Given the central role of news for democratic societies, the evolutions of news creation and distribution are a matter of public interest. The question is whether and how the production of high-quality and pluralistic news content can be left to market forces alone.
• In the short-term, some OECD countries have put emergency measures in place to financially help the struggling newspaper industry. Moreover, the  question is currently being debated what potential roles government support might take in preserving a diverse and local press without putting its independence at stake.
• Support measures and topics being debated include: (i) the improvement or intensification of existing state support policies (direct or indirect subsidies) and an extension to online news providers; (ii) new approaches to the protection of newspaper content, (iii) the relaxation of competition and media diversity laws; (iv) the role of public broadcasters; and (v) the reliability and governance of online news.

 Sounds to me as though the fourth estate is in trouble and no one seems to have a great solution. 

Share this article:      

• Posted Rita McGrath on June 21, 2010
• Trackback
• Leave a comment

New book:  The CEO’s Boss:  Tough Love in the Boardroom

My dear friend and colleague, Bill Klepper, has just published a new book.  To my knowledge, it is the first book intended to highlight the particular relationship between a CEO and the Board with practical, useful frameworks and detailed case studies.  If this interests you, it would be good to add to your bookshelf.  Here's what the publisher says about it: 

· Every CEO and his/her board should have a social contract. The first element of that contract is a common commitment to "what they stand for as an organization." Klepper provides examples of companies with clear credos, such as the revitalized Tyco which has risen from the ashes as a result of following its social contract.

· Tough love is needed for a CEO and a Board to be an effective team. The CEO's Boss lays out how tough love in the Boardroom may have prevented Lehman's ultimate collapse in the fall of 2008. Klepper's Integrated Leadership Model synthesizes the research on an effective CEO's agenda, practices and style at each phase of the business cycle.

· CEO's need to improve on 8 practices to provide more effective leadership. These include facilitating innovation, motivating change, and developing others leadership skills, among others. As a consequence, Klepper offers a script for giving feedback to your CEO.

· Boards should evaluate the congruence between its strategic agenda and a CEO's leadership practices and style before hiring. Among the factors to consider is leadership behavior, during ups and downs of a business cycle. Klepper's CEO Alignment process provides four steps to greater congruence.

· The current recession and business failures have brought renewed attention to corporate governance practices. Klepper tells us how he foresees the relationship between Boards and CEO's to be different in the future.

In order to avoid another Enron, WorldCom, or Tyco, company directors have assumed a bold and independent role in the boardroom, monitoring the actions and day-to-day operations of the CEO. This dramatic shift has created a new dynamic, one that requires careful negotiation from both parties to get the job done. Giving directors, executives, investors, and stakeholders the tools to make this relationship work, William M. Klepper describes the best techniques for building a productive partnership and establishing a plan of action for a variety of businesses and settings.

Klepper, an executive educator, has worked with AT&T, Bausch & Lomb, Johnson & Johnson, Sony, Sun Microsystems, and a host of other corporations. He knows what makes a healthy partnership between a board and its CEO and the consequences of a bad fit. In this book, he details the eight practices of successful executives, such as facilitating innovation, motivating change, and developing leadership skills, and he explains what directors need to evaluate, such as working style, social behavior, and the handling of stress, before they commit to hiring a CEO.

The most critical element is the social contract, in which directors and their CEOs agree to be transparent, continually reassess their company's risk, maintain core company values, and make a commitment to their stakeholders. These include employees, shareholders, customers, and the community. In this essential volume, Klepper encourages directors to embrace their independence, and he teaches executives to value tough love.

William M. Klepper is a professor of management at Columbia Business School.

To read an excerpt or find out more about this work go to:  Excerpt:  The CEO's Boss

If you would like a review copy, please hit reply or e-mail mh2306@columbia.edu your mailing address.

Share this article:      

• Posted Rita McGrath on June 17, 2010
• Trackback
• Leave a comment

Why a walled garden can out perform a free-for-all

I ran across this interesting post from Bob Cooper's blog over at the Kellogg site.  In it, he reprints some observations from pundits that calls into question the conventional wisdom that an open platform such as the original World Wide Web encourages more innovation.  I've actually never really bought that argument.  Instead, I believe that a 'walled garden' will always triumph over situations in which individual players try to put their own individual best feet forward, but the user has to create a complete experience themselves.  You can think about it this way:

In the beginning, stage one, companies thrive on product advantages or individual components, but users have to do their own integration of these into complete experiences.  Think of pharmaceuticals today - you win on the molecule, but the whole experience of having your illness treated is a fragmented mess.  Everything from the search for solution to the payment streams are not integrated and often quite dissatisfying.  You can think of open platforms on the Web in the same way - I might buy a piece of software, but the expeirence is not necessarily rich or useful to me.

In stage two, which is where Apple is being really clever, some player comes along who can address the gaps and deficiencies of the user experience by controlling and integrating it.  Vertically integrated players, who control all the user interfaces, can do much more for us than the scattershot approach of Phase I.  IBM in Mainframes, Nokia in many types of mobile phones, and the move by firms such as Oracle and HP to offer complete solutions reflect this sensibility.  We'll pay a LOT of money for a satisfying, bug and hassle free user experience.

Things don't stay the same, of course - in stage three, the interfaces get standardized and advantage goes to players who can dominate a horizontal layer - like Microsoft in operating systems or Intel in microprocessors. 

So we shouldn't be surprised that people are happy to innovate around a secure, well designed platform where a responsible adult is making sure we have a great experience.  This also explains why Apple and Adobe are at each others' throats - Apple doesn't want Adobe horizontalizing its platform space.  Smart strategy. 

"For about a decade now, ever since it became clear that the jungle of the World Wide Web would triumph over the walled gardens of CompuServe, AOL and MSN, a general consensus has solidified......
....That unifying creed is this: Open platforms promote innovation and diversity more effectively than proprietary ones.

In the words of one of the Web’s brightest theorists, Jonathan Zittrain of Harvard, the Web displays the “generative” power of a platform where you don’t have to ask permission to create and share new ideas. If you want democratic media, where small, innovative start-ups can compete with giant multinationals, open platforms are the way to go.....

....Over the last two years, however, that story has grown far more complicated, thanks to the runaway success of the iPhone (and now iPad ) developers platform — known as the App Store to consumers.

The App Store must rank among the most carefully policed software platforms in history. Every single application has to be approved by Apple before it can be offered to consumers, and all software purchases are routed through Apple’s cash register. Most of the development tools are created inside Apple, in conditions of C.I.A. -level secrecy. Next to the iPhone platform, Microsoft’s Windows platform looks like a Berkeley commune from the late 60s.

And yet, by just about any measure, the iPhone software platform has been, out of the gate, the most innovative in the history of computing.....
.....Perhaps more impressively, the iPhone has been a boon for small developers. As of now, more than half the top-grossing iPad apps were created by small shops.
Those of us who have championed open platforms cannot ignore these facts. It’s conceivable that, had Apple loosened the restrictions surrounding the App Store, the iPhone ecosystem would have been even more innovative, even more democratic. But I suspect that this view is too simplistic. The more complicated reality is that the closed architecture of the iPhone platform has contributed to its generativity in important ways.

The decision to route all purchases through a single payment mechanism makes great sense for Apple, which takes 30 percent of all sales, but it has also helped nurture the ecosystem by making it easier for consumers to buy small apps impulsively with one-click ordering. People don’t want to thumb-type credit card information into their phones each time they download a game to distract the kids during a long drive in the car. One-click purchase also supports lightweight, inexpensive apps, the revenue from which can support small software teams.
Consumers are also willing to experiment with new apps because they know that they have been screened for viruses, malware and other stability problems as part of the App Store’s approval process.

The fact that the iPhone platform runs exclusively on Apple hardware helps developers innovate, because it means they have a finite number of hardware configurations to surmount.....
.....But whatever Apple chooses to do with its platform in the coming years, it has made one thing clear: sometimes, if you get the conditions right, a walled garden can turn into a rain forest."

--
Posted By Bob Cooper to Driving Organic Growth and Innovation at 6/14/2010 08:00:00 AM

Share this article:      

• Posted Rita McGrath on June 14, 2010
• Trackback
• Leave a comment

Unintentional irony - the “Oh Never Mind” file

This picture from a 1999 advertisement for British Petroleum:

Share this article:      

• Posted Rita McGrath on June 05, 2010
• Trackback
• Leave a comment

Interesting “innochat” on Twitter regarding Discovery Driven Planning

A nice shout-out to Jose Briones for moderating an "innochat" on the subject of discovery diven planning.  You can see the slides he used to introduce the subject at this link:   Slideshare.   

I've been off the grid for a bit - trip to Ireland for the Senior Executive Program at the Irish Management Institute, the Microsoft CEO Summit the following week and in the last few days a "family heritage" trip with my parents and daughter. 

Share this article:      

• Posted Rita McGrath on May 31, 2010
• Trackback
• Leave a comment